I want to seamlessly distribute my music through bittorrent, but since I have a small fan base (and thus, a very small potential seeding pool), I found it difficult to connect all the moving parts.
I'll give Bitmagnet a try for an Indexer.
I did find that IPFS, with a pinning service (I won't shill the one I used in particular), was a bit easier and just worked for everyone who tried to use it.
But I'd like to get my bittorrent presence up to the "just works" level also.
You don't need an indexer for that. All you need is a static list with all your music, and people can click on links to download your music. Give them qbittorrent and it'll be running smoothly.
There is no point in running your own indexer if it's only for your own music though. If your goal is to run a more "communal" indexing point, it also makes sense to build it cooperatively with other artists, listing only content you all care about and want to distribute (rather than doing a filtering after the fact with a general indexer)
I like your idea of giving its name back to a technology that just works better, and I think it pairs really well with giving back a humane touch to how we use the internet, computers, and putting people back at the center rather than thinking about tools first !
Maybe check out how it's done here: https://archive.org/details/the-fanimatrix-div-x-5.1-hq. They don't seem to provide magnet links, but basically you create a torrent from your music. Host it somewhere (Cloudflare R2 would be good for free egress) in the right structure. Add the webseed endpoint to your torrent file and create a magnet link. Put all this stuff on a website in the download section. Let your users download it however they want.
Well for your use case of distributing your own music, Bitmagnet wouldn't be necessary.
What a DHT crawler like Bitmagnet does is the following:
1. Take a few initial "bootstrap" torrents and ping them to see which IP addresses are seeding that file
2. Ping those IP addresses and ask what other files/torrents they're seeding
3. Ping those torrents to see which IP addresses are seeding that torrent
Rinse repeat.
So to distribute your music to fans, you'd just want to put magnet links to your music on your site.
That's not correct. Torrent swarms and the DHT are separate. Each torrent basically forms its own small network of TCP connections to exchange data specific to that one torrent. While the DHT is a network shared by all clients that speak the protocol and it's carried over short-lived UDP query-response exchanges.
You have to be participating in a torrent swarm in order to bootstrap yourself into DHT at all. Bittorrent's DHT is not a network independent of torrent swarms. You need the address of a peer who is already part of the network in order to join it, and you have to get a list those addresses from somewhere.
Which of these methods is not obtaining the address of a node in a swarm, or hitting a tracker for a list of nodes in a swarm?
> People have used the DHT for non-torrent-related purposes.
This is simply non-responsive. People have used a DHT overlaid on the collection of torrent swarms for non-torrent related purposes.
> And nothing dictates that that has to be obtained via the bittorrent peer protocol.
This is a silly distinction. You also don't need to join a swarm to get on the DHT if I join a swarm to get on the DHT, write down the addresses I get on a piece of paper, then email you those addresses, which you plug into your handwritten specialized client that only knows how to join the DHT.
You don't need to ping anyone to crawl the DHT. You can passively wait and you'll get DHT queries in the form of "I'm looking for people seeding XYZ. Do you have a list?". You can just save those somewhere and you'll accumulate a list of active and new torrents.
Writing a DHT crawler is super fun, I suggest everyone to get a cheap VM and write/run one.
> I want to seamlessly distribute my music through bittorrent, but since I have a small fan base (and thus, a very small potential seeding pool), I found it difficult to connect all the moving parts.
Out of curiosity, why not just distribute via R2 or similar, or archive.org if you don't need AuthN/AuthZ? What's the complexity (to you and listeners) of BitTorrent buy you?
Well, I do distribute via some centralized platforms (including some odious ones like Spotify).
But I'd like to put forward a practice that demonstrates that the tools that have been smeared as anti-artist (chiefly but not only bittorrent) are actually compelling tools for independent distribution.
I want to seamlessly distribute my music through bittorrent, but since I have a small fan base (and thus, a very small potential seeding pool), I found it difficult to connect all the moving parts.
I'll give Bitmagnet a try for an Indexer.
I did find that IPFS, with a pinning service (I won't shill the one I used in particular), was a bit easier and just worked for everyone who tried to use it.
But I'd like to get my bittorrent presence up to the "just works" level also.