since this is rating traffic as % of total… I imagine this is less a result of “bittorrent is dying/nobody uses it” and more a result of “the rest of the internet traffic has grown exponentially with the availability of ubiquitous fast connections, while the number of bittorrent consumers has been roughly steady”
no shit BitTorrent was the majority of traffic in 2004. Most connected users were still using some form of DSL or low-bandwidth cable, and some of us were even still using ISDN/Dialup. Even youtube was still a pipe-dream, so most “normal” browsing folk were loading forum web pages with sizes <50k per page. Bittorrent allowing resilient, long-term downloads over slow pipes was the only thing that even EXISTED for bulk data transfer, and could saturate a pipe for days.
Also when you combine this with some other news, like “Bots now make up nearly half of all internet traffic, and that’s very bad news for our security”, it skews it even further to being rather meaningless - bots are probably doing quite a bit less bittorrenting.
In early 2019 bittorrent’s website views fluctuated between ~6M to ~9M. Now it’s around 3M to 4M.
In early 2019 utorrent’s visits fluctuated between ~26M to ~75M. Now it sits around 25M to 21M.
The fact that there were far more captures in early 2019 for both of them might be an indication that this was their peak, and while visits have reduced since then they’re far from dying.
Streaming services may be part of the reason, though I also think it’s because many games and software have switched to freemium & microtransactions so spending money is optional, along with the fact that free and open source alternatives to mainstream software have become more robust and popular. When I was a kid I torrented Sony Vegas, but now that’s simply not necessary since we have DaVinci Resolve.
uTorrent sold out, its decline is not only due to BitTorrent becoming less popular, but also because what was once a very thin client at one point was bundled with malware so a lot of people kept using old versions or switched to clients like qBitTorrent
Well, people have migrated from Utorrent to qbittorrent or other BT clients after Utorrent was classified as malware.
and bittorrent.com owns Utorrent so…
I have never visited the actual website of any of the clients either. Getting programs from their website is so windows XP.
Magazine CDs and DVDs were my bacon.
apt-get install qbittorrentwhy would I visit their site for any reason?And just to add - why is torrenting associated with shady stuff? Linux isos are available and download much faster over it, same for some monolithic applications like LibreOffice and other regular stuff.
Doesn’t matter, Linux users a tiny minority of end users and those using Debian’s package manager are a minority of even that. You’re less than a rounding error.
Sick burn
I know those good old school days. downloading movies, songs, games, and wares on utorrent. No ransomware, no social media giants, just sharing content and information and exploring the internet at 286kbps.
Ah, downloading postage stamp sized anime releases that still took all day. Forget binging a series in one go, you watched an episode or two a day because that was as fast as you could get them.
But you can’t forget the absolute minefield of the era of Kazaa, Emule & Limewire - you never knew when you’d get a virus, something random, literally just cp or actually manage to grab the thing you intended to.
Was torrent available (or common) during those speeds? I remember napster/kazaa/limeware and downloading stuff like green day.exe
I started using torrents when I already had broadband, although very asymmetrical
Most pirate sites today are streaming-based and BitTorrent lost pretty much all of its ‘market share’ there too.
Somehow I doubt this one.
I mean I can believe that some people have switched from BT to news with the surge of the arr stack, and that streaming has definitely curbed use of BT for a while.
But “pretty much all”? That’s harder to believe. Especially since streaming is starting to go to shit again.
There was a blip in time a few years back when you really didn’t need to learn how to bittorrent, you could just google what you wanted and you’d get a pirate streaming site showing it. I’ve been torrenting for almost two decades now and still kissanime/aniwatch/zoto whatever was the faster choice most of the time, and even now I sometimes use the Kodi plugin Otaku when I just want to watch an ep or two while eating, and that grabs stuff from streaming sites. Granted it is getting worse and worse, with the sites being absolutely riddled with ads and seemingly rebranding twice a month due to takedowns which has me going back to nyaa more often.
What I’ve seen from the average person, torrenting safely is for techies and most aren’t bothered with the effort of it. It’s a low hurdle that most people don’t want to waste time on. Building a local collection takes a shit ton of time. I’m currently rebuilding my music collection to roll my own music streaming server and I’m questioning the time value. But I’m sick of music I like getting deplatformed due to licensing
For music I’m just sick of the apps streaming super compressed crap. It sounds like 192kbps MP3 sometimes and you can definitely tell the difference. Setup Airsonic and never looked back, although still have YT music for the fam and finding new music. It is a bit of hassle, but it’s worth it and a FLAC collection feels way smaller than it did 10-20 years ago (both in terms of disk and home streaming bandwidth).
I was using streaming-based sites the first few years because it was easy but it had its issues. With uBlock Origin, ads and popups weren’t a problem anymore but there were still issues like bad quality, buffering and your progress in a show not being tracked. This promptet me to try out Jellyfin with the arr stack and it’s so much better. I had to get used to having to wait for shows and movies to download before being able to watch them but the experience was so much better aside from that. Great quality, a nice interface where your progress is tracked, everything loads perfectly fine, I can make accounts for friends and family and no ads or shit like that. It took some time to perfect my setup but now I have a lot of private torrent trackers and usenet and I can get pretty much everything I want to watch, even in German, in the best quality that is available, especially when something’s available in AV1.
You need time, knowledge and money to get a setup as good as I have and it’s worth it for me personally (selfhosting is also my main hobby, after all) but most people don’t have all that, so I can understand why doing it like this is a pretty niche thing and why not a lot of people are doing it nowadays.
Jellyfin is great, I have it setup with iptv as well, and tailscale so I can reach it from any of my devices from anywhere. It actually saves me a ton of money, since having sport stream subscriptions is cooooostly, and I just use my main computer as host.
I just have it accessible through my domain. IPTV is interesting but I have no idea how it works.
I just dislike having public things. With WireGuard and then tailscale, VPNs got so hasselfree that I’ve removed most things from the open net. Reduces setup time and management a lot.
IPTV is basically paid piracy. Someone else has grabbed most commercial channels from somewhere and sell it to other people. Usually they have a collection of movies/shows you can stream as well. But I only use it for sports really.
So they basically stream what is being broadcast on these channels to you? What does it cost? I have friends who watch sports too, if it’s cheaper it might be worth it if I set it up for them on my server.
Basically, yes. It costs me about $140 a year.
Truthfully BT is about to explode with DHT once bitmagnet implements indexing it will be game over. You can just point it at a folder with your files and every torrent that ever contained that file will be seeded automatically no matter what folder or name it has. Everyone has gig connections now.
I mean IPFS was that solution to me for a while tbh. Even then libp2p like peertube uses and matrix offer some exciting examples into the future.
Lol, that point about VPNs making the measurement a bit pointless at the end
I’d be using Torrents more often if they were as fast as DDL
I wish there were something like DarkMX, only FOSS and more popular, or like Retroshare, only limited to that usage, easier to use and less buggy, and again more popular.
Something like aMule, but anonymous, performant for many small files on the network, allowing to share directory structures etc.
Yeah the fear mongering works. I was getting cease and dissits, BT traffic blocked, etc when I was using to get public domain content back in 2000 something. Now every that does it talks about how to do it safely. Use a VPS in a non-five eyes country with Tor enabled and logging disabled, download to your tails desktop and sneaker net to main machine, from there use media server to host it in your network, blah blah blah
Or use duck duck go and click through a dozen links and stream it.
Heck even peertube users get flak from governments because it could be seen as “redistribution”.
P2P is almost always a better for user technology, but centralization is favored by governments for control and corporations for rent seeking.
