Instead of leaving Xitter, they left Mastodon. Proton’s trend is not inspiring confidence and this feels like another step backwards.

  • boydster@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    6·
    9 hours ago

    You keep posting this and I haven’t been using port forwarding at all but torrents keep coming through. What am I missing here? Serious question, because I do not know what I’m either doing wrong or missing out on with port forwarding and I have not been experiencing what I would call a degraded experience as far as I can tell, but there’s a whole world of things that I’m entirely ignorant to.

    • Azzu@lemm.eeEnglish
      4·
      8 hours ago

      A connection has to be established. That is only possible if one side has an open port.

      So you can basically not connect to other people with closed ports, which reduces your available pool of people to connect to.

      As long as there are enough people with open ports for you, you and the torrent ecosystem will be fine. But when nobody or very few people have open ports, torrenting simply doesn’t work.

      • boydster@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        3·
        7 hours ago

        Thanks, this is a little difficult to parse while I’m looking at my seeds uploading at ratios well over 1.00 but just the same I’m running a new VPN tunnel with port forwarding enabled to see what difference it makes.

        Plex works for the people I share with outside my network. No port forwarding. I just don’t get what I am not getting, and every explainer I get is basically what you posted (no offense) and it doesn’t match what my experience is showing me.

        • Azzu@lemm.eeEnglish
          2·
          4 hours ago

          Here is it illustrated by multiple examples:

          • Situation: You are the only one seeding a torrent, with ports closed
            • Another person with ports closed wants to get the torrent. They will never be able to get it since you two can’t establish a connection.
            • Another person with an open port wants to get the torrent. Eventually, after some delay, your client connects to the tracker and gets a list of people who want to get the torrent (leechers). You get the IP and port of the person who wants to get the torrent, you connect to them, you start uploading to them.
          • Situation: You are the only one seeding a torrent, but have ports open
            • No matter if a leecher has ports closed or open, they get your IP+Port from the tracker, connect to you, and you upload to them

          The situation with more clients is more nuanced, but essentially the same:

          • Situation: There are 5 seeders with open ports seeding a torrent
            • Everything works perfectly all the time
          • Situation: There are 5 seeders with closed ports seeding a torrent
            • For a leecher with open port, everything works perfectly
            • For a leecher with closed port, they will never get the torrent ever
          • Situation: There are 5 seeders seeding a torrent. 4 have their ports closed, 1 has it open.
            • 10 leechers with ports closed want to get the torrent. The only one that can upload to them is the 1 seeder with port open, the other 4 seeders are useless.
            • 10 leechers with ports open want to get the torrent. All 5 seeders seed their torrent equally and everything works perfectly.
            • 5 leechers with ports closed and 5 leechers with ports open want to get the torrent.
              • The 5 leechers with ports closed are only serviced by the 1 seeder with port open
              • The 5 leechers with port open get the torrent from all 5 seeders.
              • The 1 seeder with open port seeds to every leecher, the protocol doesn’t discriminate. So in a perfectly equal world, the 1 seeder with port open seeds to all 10 leechers, so each leecher gets 1/10th of their upload speed.
              • The 4 seeders with closed port only seed to the 5 leechers with open port, giving each of them 1/5th of their upload speed.
              • This means that, if you add this all up, the 5 leechers with closed ports get 1/10th (1 seeder times 1/10th) of one seeders’ full upload speed, while the leechers with open ports get 9/10ths (1 seeder times 1/10th and 4 seeders times 2/10ths) of one seeders’ full upload speed.

          as you can see, the people with open ports have a massive speed advantage in this example, literally getting 9 times the upload speed available in the network. But essentially, torrenting still works as long as some people have open ports, just everyone with closed ports is at a severe disadvantage.

          Now there are a couple more issues with closed ports (like DHT/pex not working) but they all boil down to the same problem: the ones with closed ports can only get stuff from people with open ports. Thus they are at a massive disadvantage and get reduced speeds or in contrived situations with few seeders even nothing.

    • asret@lemmy.zipEnglish
      3·
      8 hours ago

      I think port forwarding is more important for seeding when it comes to torrents. Someone has to be able to initiate the connection.

      • boydster@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        4·
        8 hours ago

        Well that is something I’ll need to look into. My seed ratios seem to be keeping up too though, so I’m still not sure if port forwarding is a solution in search of a problem on my end. I guess I have more learning to do. Thank you for giving me a direction to start investigating.

        • 10001110101@lemm.eeEnglish
          4·
          7 hours ago

          If you’re not port-forwarding, only peers that are port-forwarding can download from you. And you can only download from peers that are port-forwarding. There can be times where a torrent only has a few seeders, but they are not port-forwarding, and if you’re not either, you won’t be able to download the torrent.

          • boydster@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            3·
            7 hours ago

            Ah ok thank you, I think the fact that the other party could be providing this capability was the component that I wasn’t conceptualizing before. Thank you for this post, I don’t know why this was so hard to grasp for me but this landed.