I’m excited to announce the first alpha preview of this project that I’ve been working on for the past 4 months. I’m initially posting about this in a few small communities, and hoping to get some input from early adopters and beta testers.
What is a DHT crawler?
The DHT crawler is Bitmagnet’s killer feature that (currently) makes it unique. Well, almost unique, read on…
So what is it? You might be aware that you can enable DHT in your BitTorrent client, and that this allows you find peers who are announcing a torrent’s hash to a Distributed Hash Table (DHT), rather than to a centralized tracker. DHT’s lesser known feature is that it allows you to crawl the info hashes it knows about. This is how Bitmagnet’s DHT crawler works works - it crawls the DHT network, requesting metadata about each info hash it discovers. It then further enriches this metadata by attempting to classify it and associate it with known pieces of content, such as movies and TV shows. It then allows you to search everything it has indexed.
This means that Bitmagnet is not reliant on any external trackers or torrent indexers. It’s a self-contained, self-hosted torrent indexer, connected via the DHT to a global network of peers and constantly discovering new content.
The DHT crawler is not quite unique to Bitmagnet; another open-source project, magnetico was first (as far as I know) to implement a usable DHT crawler, and was a crucial reference point for implementing this feature. However that project is no longer maintained, and does not provide the other features such as content classification, and integration with other software in the ecosystem, that greatly improve usability.
Currently implemented features of Bitmagnet:
- A DHT crawler
- A generic BitTorrent indexer: Bitmagnet can index torrents from any source, not only the DHT network - currently this is only possible via the /import endpoint; more user-friendly methods are in the pipeline
- A content classifier that can currently identify movie and television content, along with key related attributes such as language, resolution, source (BluRay, webrip etc.) and enriches this with data from The Movie Database
- An import facility for ingesting torrents from any source, for example the RARBG backup
- A torrent search engine
- A GraphQL API: currently this provides a single search query; there is also an embedded GraphQL playground at /graphql
- A web user interface implemented in Angular: currently this is a simple single-page application providing a user interface for search queries via the GraphQL API
- A Torznab-compatible endpoint for integration with the Serverr stack
Interested?
If this project interests you then I’d really appreciate your input:
- How did you get along with following the documentation and installation instructions? Were there any pain points?
- There’s a roadmap of high-priority features on the website - what do you see as the highest priority for near-term development?
- If you’re a developer, are you interested in contributing to the project?
Thanks for your attention. If you’re interested in this project and would like to help it gain momentum then please give it a star on GitHub, and expect further updates soon!
Except that now you’re asking the swarm for metadata behind a boatload of info_hashes? Unlikely anyone would care (though you’d be surprised how many DMCAs I get when just having a simple open tracker running, not even an indexet), but I don’t see it as being any less grey than using any existing sites.
In some jurisdictions hosting links to pirated content is considered illegal. In others it is not. You are now not hosting publicly available links. Many of those rulings were based on the publicly available nature and that you were providing OTHER people with the information. You are now simply obtaining the whole of the DHT yourself. You can’t be assumed to be doing anything illegal with it, because it’s everything. You could be doing research on swarms of computers, you could be looking for a linux torrent…the act of collecting ALL of the data yourself, doesn’t violate the laws in the way they were ruled on.
Additionally some sites have been MITMd so that they saw when people were browsing…say…“Barbie Movie”…and then they watched the DHT for a client connecting soon after, and could connect them to users with VPNs because people are browsing these sites not behind a VPN, but torrenting behind a VPN when they torrent.
Browsing something like Nyaa isn’t technically illegal - but people have been targeted over it. When you don’t have to browse Nyaa using a web browser, you bypass that whole shebang.
That’s also the case with open trackers (without indexers), yet I’ve gotten shut down way too many times. But that made me wonder, does this project share metadata if someone else in the DHT swarm queries for an info_hash you have, or does it simply “leech”? Pretty cool project regardless.