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Who remembers Skytorrents (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13423629)? Posted as a "Show HN" here, it was a DHT-sourced index and stack written in C with no JavaScript, no cookies, no ads, no tracking. Skytorrents was unbelievably fast, friendly, and complete, and this translated into rapid adoption and traffic growth that caused the site to shut down due to server costs after just a year (https://torrentfreak.com/skytorrents-dumps-massive-torrent-d...).

It was a shame that the technology behind Skytorrents was never open-sourced; it was the best torrent crawler and site I've ever seen, and I would have liked to see how it worked so well.



I guess the takeaway is that a public torrent site can (probably) never be sustainable while acting in users' best interests?


Skytorrentz was great, but I never knew it had been coded in C nor presented here. Thanks for the background info.


I feel like writing a fast torrent tracker isn't particularly hard. The hard part is the legal risk.


This can't be underestimated. Legal is by and large the largest risk of a torrent site. Maybe one day..


Never heard of it, what an interesting read




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