We've had npubs regularly suggest that #Alexandria is superfluous because of file torrents. Just put up a website with a search engine for Pirate Bay, and you're done.
Anyone can vibe-code that in 2 minutes, so why spend 2 years torturing ourselves ?
There are a few reasons, why we didn't do this:
- Someone already did it. It's called Anna's Archive. Most of what they list is open-access, but they also knowingly list copyrighted material, so they are stuck in a perpetual cat-and-mouse game with the domain registry and the NSA. No, thanks.
- Everything that isn't under copyright — and everything that is — can already be viewed and downloaded from a website, as a file. The world didn't need another one of those. (Although we also provide a download utility, we are working to make it obsolete). The world needed someone to solve the problems those download-sites haven't solved.
- Torrents are (since v2.0) hashed, but not signed. That means you can confirm that one torrent has the same content as another, but you can't determine the publisher. That means that you are reliant on centralized index repositories (such as Pirate Bay 🏴☠), to know if you have the correct, complete file, or just some garbage.
- Files are a form of document archival, unlike highly-accessible events. Saving a book to a file essentially takes it out of active use. It's the equivalent of putting it in a cardboard box and storing it in the attic verses leaving it on the nightstand. The book on the nightstand is the one you talk about, scribble in, screenshot and share on social media. Everything else is just collecting dust. Keep all books you care about on your e-nightstand.
- Everything should be atomized and just stay that way. There is no benefit to splitting something large up, according to an index, transporting it in pieces, and then reassembling it according to the index, to use it. Just leave the books in pieces. Store it in pieces. Comment on it, in pieces. Highlight parts of pieces. Share pieces. Analyze and search for pieces. Rearrange pieces within and remix pieces between indexes.
- If you want something highly-decentralized and censorship-resistent, utilize a protocol people use to communicate about mundane things, and that isn't bound to any particular channel. Because Nostr events are signed and therefore verifiable in isolation, you can transport them over any medium and in any constellation: http, udp, cd-rom, tor, meshastic, radio, Bluetooth, e-mail, SMS, carrier pigeons... or torrents. And you can determine what the precise content of that transport is.
- Unlike BitTorrent, which has been around a very long time, Nostr was designed by people who understood how Bitcoin works. They baked crytography, atomization, latent/passive distribution, decentralization, push-communication, and censorship-resistence right into NIP-01. It's all in there and doesn't have to be messily glued-on to the protocol, after the fact.
https://media.tenor.com/lcO2YMmnwEIAAAAC/all-i-have-to-say-thats-all.gif
