Bitmagnet -https://bitmagnet.io/ - does exactly that. I left it running for a few weeks and then stopped the crawler. Didn't expect much, but still somewhat disappointed by the garbage it reeled in.
probably worth adding some ML filter to it because yeah, most of the bulky stuff in bittorrent is always going to be garbage - a lot like the internet generally, the value is in filtering the good stuff out
I've had one running for over a year now, it's replaced my usage of regular torrent sites completely, there is a lot of junk, and it gets stale, but it's still a better experience than most of the public trackers out there IMO
I built one with a nice TUI to run on a VPS so I can try and find rare magazine torrents, but Hetzner were upset about it. I need to find it a new home. It was a very good citizen, but it still raised too many flags.
I think generally you have to be very conservative about how you use ultra cheap hosts like hetzner simply due to the economics. Either find a more expensive service that will exert more effort towards discretion or alternatively spend $5 per month on a VPN that's friendly to torrents.
I heard the more money you're paying them the more lenient they are.
For cheap hosts look for ones that allow tor exit nodes if you're looking for ones that allow funny stuff. There are some that allow it for ideological reasons. Look through the hundreds on lowendtalk. On that forum you can even ask the providers directly if they allow it.
Runs fine at home. I've indexed 20M+ torrents in last few months running it during the day. With Prowlarr (or similar) it could easily replace other indexers.
Anything I don't have! Sometimes I'll find a torrent and no seeds/peers and I'll wonder if there is another torrent out there that has the same files in it somewhere that I can find.
The other day it was trying to track down some older High Times issues that were torrented but the torrent is dead. Last night it was a mag titled Films & Filming which I know is scanned, but I can't find anywhere.
High Times is mostly on archive.org, if you need that one. I'd sort of like the film-making one, I'll put some time into that. On my list of periodicals, I think the count's up to 500 that I consider important enough to archive and I'm nowhere near done with it.
Distributed hash table - ButTorrent extension for discovering torrent's seeders by advertising its hash across known peer pool, think of it as a distributed tracker. Contrary to traditional way of asking a known tracker for peers of that torrent.
Its algorithm is very elegant, using binary search on peers' and torrents' hashes, narrowing down to peers that are more likely to be seeders (or at least know some).
I built one with a nice TUI to run on a VPS so I can try and find rare magazine torrents, but Hetzner were upset about it. I need to find it a new home. It was a very good citizen, but it still raised too many flags.
For cheap hosts look for ones that allow tor exit nodes if you're looking for ones that allow funny stuff. There are some that allow it for ideological reasons. Look through the hundreds on lowendtalk. On that forum you can even ask the providers directly if they allow it.
The other day it was trying to track down some older High Times issues that were torrented but the torrent is dead. Last night it was a mag titled Films & Filming which I know is scanned, but I can't find anywhere.
(no affiliation with them)
This year, I was giving it as an assignment to students. Does not take much time with LLMs.
https://bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0051.html
Its algorithm is very elegant, using binary search on peers' and torrents' hashes, narrowing down to peers that are more likely to be seeders (or at least know some).
https://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0005.html