etracker Public Demo

Over the past two months I have been sharing work here and on Github on a new BitTorrent tracker etracker. I’m happy to share that a public demo is now available: https://etracker.moerner.com/. The public demo is deployed with a small infohash allowlist consisting of recent Linux ISOs. An expanded frontend with support for suggesting allowed infohashes is under development.

To briefly summarize: etracker is a tracker designed to contribute to solving free-riding problems in the BitTorrent protocol at the tracker level. Clients which behave poorly (failing to seed snatches; failing to upload more than they download) receive proportionately less peers from the tracker than clients which are well-behaved. New BitTorrent clients to the tracker receive a full complement of peers, so there is no startup penalty when initially joining the tracker.

Full details can be found on Github, and in this set of slides from a presentation at the Recurse Center.