I’m willing to put up a domain. I think this would be a good idea. Private invites from Lemmy. What I don’t have is the technical knowledge to do this, since trackers are really intensive to make. I guess what I’m asking is if there is enough interest here to make our own private tracker. It will be very intensive on the dev end, but maybe we can do something for real here.

I’m not going to exaggerate here - we’d need the full power of the hundreds of devs on Lemmy to do this. It won’t be easy, but I believe it is possible. I also believe that it is worth it. Between us all, we may have just about every Linux Distro available. The hosting will be a problem for sure, but maybe we can sort that out.

If anyone is interested in doing this, we can make a github repo, or whatever is necessary.

Again, I think this is worth pursuing. We could potentially make a decentralized private tracker.

  • Damage@feddit.it
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    2 months ago

    I don’t understand what would be the advantages over other trackers

    • ReversalHatchery@beehaw.org
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      2 months ago

      and over public DHT. we can share magnet links in this community, and why keep it to us only? if we keep it public, the survivability of torrents can even improve

        • ReversalHatchery@beehaw.org
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          2 months ago

          I have a few hundred public torrents active, and they all have peers, even the “fringe” ones. maybe your statistics is right, but even then it has value. I don’t care about leechers if it improves the service for us too

          • SaltySalamander@fedia.io
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            2 months ago

            Leechers do not in any way improve the service, i.e. swarm. They harm the swarm by providing nothing to the swarm.

  • antlion@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    2 months ago

    BaconBits was a Reddit tracker with a maximum user count around 6000. They eventually closed because most of the users could get the same content from other trackers, with better choices about bitrate or codec, or better seeding. I’m not convinced Lemmy has enough users to support a private tracker, I think you need like 20k active users to be worthwhile.

  • ben_dover@lemmy.ml
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    2 months ago

    i love the idea, but p2p filesharing laws are quite strict where i live. i wouldn’t feel 100% safe even using a private tracker, i’ll have to stick to debrid services to cover my ass

  • andrew_bidlaw@sh.itjust.works
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    2 months ago

    Small private trackers usually share some sphere of interests, like music, hd tv, sports, books, manga, etc, so the volume of content is comparatively small and other people on the platform are semi-interested in seeding uploads they don’t use themselves and inspecting if they are alright. We don’t have numbers for a general-use tracker just yet. And also - most instances would be very cautious of federating contents promoting direct links to any sort of piracy.

    • jawa21@lemmy.sdf.orgOP
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      2 months ago

      I mean, yeah. That isn’t necessarily the point here, though. There’s a lot of frustration surrounding the need for private trackers and we could maybe solve that here.

  • Lemmchen@feddit.org
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    2 months ago

    Why do you think we need devs for this? Setting up a bittorrent tracker doesn’t involve any dev work.

  • Mr_Blott@feddit.uk
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    2 months ago

    I’ve got the entire collection of Hyacinth Bucket in Keeping Up Appearances, along with every programme Fred Dibnah ever did

    You’re welcome to them to get you started as long as the site wallpaper is fine bone china with hand painted periwinkles

  • CosmicTurtle0@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    2 months ago

    I’m not opposed to a lemmy-based tracker but will admit I’ve never made one before.

    I have extensive dev experience and would be willing to learn.

    My constraints would be time honestly.

  • Brickfrog@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    2 months ago

    It’s a nice gesture but I’m a bit doubtful that there’s enough people here to sustain a private tracker. Taking a guess at this but it seems most people here in c/piracy are general users, not specifically private tracker users - in fact a fair amount don’t even like the idea of private trackers.

    !trackers@lemmy.dbzer0.com exists but it’s pretty quiet by comparison.

    Not saying it’s a bad idea but it could be a while before a niche tracker like that would gain enough traction to sustain itself. And I’m just talking about a regular private tracker, not even going to touch on the idea of someone developing a “decentralized private tracker” whatever that means… TBH if you want decentralized just stick to public torrents with DHT/PEX, that’s already decentralized. Or maybe make a semi-private tracker like Demonoid if that’s more along the lines of what you want.