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Comment by hendersoon | Hacker News Reader

(Putting legality aside) this is fine, if you assume a site like The Pirate Bay is nothing more than a collection of links. But it's not.

The metadata is important. When you download a file, you want to see how popular it is. Popular files tend to be higher-quality, safer, and always download faster.

The community is central to the experience. The comments matter. They talk about a file being fake, or virus-infected, or poor quality. They give instructions for using the download properly. This is valuable information.

Moderation is critical. Who removes links to broken, fake, infected, or poor-quality files?

Download sites are more than collections of links. The Pirate Bay wasn't successful due to its volume of .torrent files. Anyone can host a bunch of little files up for download. Its infrastructure and community were key components of its success. The links alone aren't interesting at all.

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We have federated comments: pump.io or its precursor GNU Social, née status.net. Isn't it just a SMOP to tie together these piratebays together with one of these?

Yeah, this is a WIP of how Mediagoblin is using pump.io to federate comments:

http://mediagoblin.readthedocs.org/en/latest/index.html#part...

Is there a resource describing the state of current usage of pump.io etc? On the one hand, it seems to be used on several sites and some projects are working on it, on the other hand a lot of it is still in the works and most links that are not "create your account" pages seem to be for dead sites: I clicked around the wiki for publicly visible aggregators etc. I found one that showed posts from August after loading for a few minutes, the others all led to non-responding servers.

(Basically: I'm interested in the general topic, but I can't get a sense if it is actually going anywhere)

It looks like they're working on pump.io, and it already does some interesting things. I still have my old identi.ca account which now runs on pump.io, although you can't get new accounts there. However, it's got very little documentation, and seem to still be a large case of UTSL.

There's some stuff in its wiki, but not much more.

https://github.com/e14n/pump.io/wiki/User-Guide

Cool! Once you have federated comments why wouldn't you just distribute a popularity index and torrent magnet links via the same mechanism?

Once you get all that stuff functional you end up with a truly decentralized platform and there's no reason for anyone to "host" their own cordoned-off copy in the first place. It actually /solves/ the problem.

Exactly, federated Pirate Bay solves many problems.

This sounds almost exactly like eDonkey, which is what we used before BitTorrent. eDonkey used to be much better for rare items, though BitTorrent worked better for popular items. eDonkey used to let you start searches that would run for days, asking neighbour nodes to ask other neighbour nodes, etc.

I miss it and I think there's a lot that can be learned from it.

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