OK, so I would love to write a new bittorrent client to support the science & culture preservation work of @SafeguardingResearch and https://sciop.net.
We're running into some edge cases where the assumptions of the mainstream bittorrent clients don't hold, partly just the sheer size of some of the datasets we're archiving, partly the structure of them (many smaller files vs one large incompressible movie).
My very vague guess is that it would probably take a good 3 months full time to get something up to the level of functionality needed. Any ideas how I persuade someone to pay me to do that...? 😅
@petrichor FWIW, there's a pretty sizeable collection of purpose-specific BitTorrent modules in the JS ecosystem (especially the stuff underlying WebTorrent). Might make it easier to build a custom thing out of easily modifiable/replaceable parts?
@joepie91 Rust is probably my language of choice for this, and there are similarly quite a few of the building blocks already on crates.io. Interestingly a lot of them seem to have been started in 2020 and many not updated much in the last couple of years. How many were COVID projects that got abandoned, I wonder... 😂
@joepie91 WebTorrent is really interesting, I think someone was looking at teaching https://replayweb.page/ to load WARC/WACZ from the swarm, which would be really cool.
I'm not hugely familiar with JS so getting fully up to speed with the language and ecosystem would probably take too much time, but it would be even better to have more than one new client. Let a thousand flowers bloom!