It’s kind of silly, but I still really dig the idea behind torrenting and peer to peer sharing of data. It’s cool to think about any old computer helping pass along some odd bits & bytes of data, whether a goofy drawing or strange story.
I don’t think they do it anymore, but spotify started out with a p2p network on the backend.
Super smart way of bootstrapping such a thing without having to upfront huge server costs.AI model weights. Patches for MMOs (World of Warcraft famously used this to good effect).
I think a good chunk of the Internet Archive is available as torrents, at least the software collections and public domain media.
You can also download a torrent of the whole of Wikipedia, with and without images.
Do you know how big those two Wikipedia downloads are?
As of last year, English Wikipedia, articles only, text only, was about 22GB compressed (text compresses pretty efficiently), according to the current version of this page:
As of 2 July 2023, the size of the current version of all articles compressed is about 22.14 GB without media
Some other sources describe the uncompressed offline copies as being around 50 GB, with another 100 GB or so for images.
Wikimedia, which includes all the media types, has about 430 TB of media stored.
This might be stretching the definition of “common” and “torrenting,” but BitTorrent created BitTorrent Sync with similar tech for personal file synchronization. It was later rebranded Resilio and still exists today.
An open-source alternative that works in a similar fashion, SyncThing, also exists.
Downloading actual linux ISOs with bittorrent is soo much faster than downloading them directly from the distro’s mirror. I always use bittorent to download new linux distros I’d like to try.
Also, I believe p2p protocols are still popular in korea because ISPs there actually charge website operators for bandwidth delivered to korean customers. Twitch pulled out of korea because of this. I think their competitors there, e.g. AfreecaTV, uses p2p for their streams.
One funny use I discovered when I was cloning a lot of computers is that even on a closed lan, BT with local discovery was stupidly fast in distributing a big set of files across a pile of computers instead of rsync. Also, setting it up was much easier.
There’s Syncthing and it’s proprietary counterpart Resilio that allow you to sync folders between machines and send individual files over p2p. Very neat software.
Accessing public domain content that’s not hosted digitally otherwise.
IIRC Steam uses BitTorrent to help users download game assets. There’s an option to switch it off, still, so must still be going.
I podcast I listen to says that they used to distribute episodes by BitTorrent, way back in like 2006, as a way to keep bandwidth costs down when they were new. I’m pretty sure they had stopped that option by the time I started listening in about 2008/9.
Transferring files to several other computers. I’ve done it in the past before I used KDE connect to transfer files rather than use ftp or just memory sticks. It would be useful at a LAN party to get several copies of the software distributed. (Kinda piracy but doesn’t have to be if the game is free or everyone owns it legitimately).
I torrent old out of print books that I can’t find anywhere else. The scans are usually pretty good. There was also a podcast I used to listen to called Caustic Soda. When they ended it, they released all of their episodes through torrenting so the fans could have them.
Software updates. I think Windows will uses p2p but not sure if it’s torrent protocol.
I remember when it was relatively new and controversial BBC’s iPlayer hadn’t been around very long and they said they were going to start using Bittorrent tech for streaming. Guessing that never came to fruition though.
Its a really interesting question. I wonder what the underlying economics and ideologies are at play with its decline. Economies of scale for large server farms? Desire for control of the content/copyright? Structure and shape of the network?
I guess it has some implications for stream versus download approaches to content?