When bittorrent was released, I saw the technological aspects as groundbreaking, thinking it would be repurposed for much more than ISO downloads and mass media distribution. How did the technology not become a more popular way of distributing via crowdsourcing large community datasets, such as openstreetmaps, or something like distribution of Android rom updates, when the costs of distribution are so expensive?

  • TootSweet@lemmy.worldEnglish
    18·
    9 hours ago

    The costs of distribution aren’t really that expensive for big companies.

    You can’t really trust that users are going to be willing to donate hard drive space and upload bandwidth to help your maps service or whatever work. (Though, to be fair, you did mention things like OpenStreetMap which is probably more likely for users to be willing to support that way.)

    Bittorrent isn’t something you can seamlessly integrate into browser-based apps.

    But also, there are newer technologes based on a very Bittorrent-like P2P way of doing things. IPFS is basically reskinned Bittorrent. And Peertube uses in-browser P2P to distribute videos. I don’t think there’s any standard in, say, HTML5 that allows for P2P without some hacks, but it sounds like there’s a good chance such a standard is likely to make its way into browsers in the relatively near future. Also, it sounds like Chrome supports more than Firefox in that area right now.