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   silverpill (silverpill@mitra.social)'s status on Thursday, 04-Sep-2025 05:54:27 JST silverpill

   in reply to

   • Bill Statler
   • Streams/Forte Tea Garden

   @streamsgarden @billstatler Interesting! I knew about this project but didn't realize they plan to use FEP-ef61

   • Embed this notice
     Streams/Forte Tea Garden (streamsgarden@forum.statler.ws)'s status on Thursday, 04-Sep-2025 05:54:36 JST Streams/Forte Tea Garden

     • Bill Statler
     • Streams/Forte Tea Garden
      Bill Statler wrote the following post Tue, 02 Sep 2025 20:36:57 -0700Federated bittorrent tracker, using nomadic identities and objects
     This isn't directly related to (streams)/Forte, but I thought some of you might be interested.
     
     SciOp is a website and software that was initially created as a lifeboat for data being deleted from the Internet by the Trump administration and other governments. They're using bittorrent, which means anyone can contribute a few terabytes of storage, and data can be stored in multiple copies and locations.
     
     Their longer-term plans aim for a "federated bittorrent tracker" that will be "the distributed bulk archive for public information we've always needed".
     
     Here's the tie-in with (streams)/Forte: They plan to use portable (nomadic) identities and objects, and a permissions-based system:
     
     ...Sciop, like all bittorrent trackers, is a means of social curation of torrent metadata. While the torrents, and the data storage and transfer they facilitate, can exist independently of sciop as an index, metadata indexing is necessary to make the torrents discoverable, useful, and trustworthy. ...
     
     There is a longstanding problem, however, with resilience to loss of metadata: when a tracker goes down all its metadata is lost, and every torrent must be manually re-uploaded to a successor tracker, if any emerges. ...
     
     The catalogue becomes a single point of failure and a system of concentrated power; that's where federation comes in.
     
     We are taking the lessons from the federated social web and applying them to bittorrent, where individual people or groups can host their own instances and make their own decisions about curation and scope. This creates a shared space, where the the work of moderation & curation is spread across the network, and datasets can be shared and mutated across instances. ...
     
     ...we intend to experiment with a model of federation that decouples accounts and data from server instances without requiring a central firehose or platform to gate access. ...
     
     We will be attempting to be backwards-compatible with the existing fediverse, but that will be a secondary consideration to making the system we want to exist for sciop - we will not be waiting for acceptance of FEPs or reject functionality because it is incompatible with mastodon's API. ...
     
     They are aware of FEP-ef61, which is the nomadic system we have in (streams)/Forte, and they may be building off of that, along with other similar FEP proposals.
     
     It's nice to see a project that wants to build something new but also doesn't want to reinvent every wheel they need.
     
     Technical info here.
     
     @Bill Statler