Asklemmy

44192 readers

1127 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
!lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

119

Besides Linux isos and piracy, what are some common uses of torrenting? (lemm.ee)

submitted 9 months ago by ALostInquirer@lemm.ee to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

31 comments fedilink hide all child comments

It's kind of silly, but I still really dig the idea behind torrenting and peer to peer sharing of data. It's cool to think about any old computer helping pass along some odd bits & bytes of data, whether a goofy drawing or strange story.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] ShittyBeatlesFCPres@lemmy.world 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

If I recall, Spotify moved away from it just because the client/server model got way cheaper and the P2P model had some limitations for their future business plans. I remember them mentioning that offering a family plan was a challenge with their P2P architecture when people on the same network/account were using it at the same time.

It was probably also part of the move to smartphones. Spotify was just a desktop program for a long time and, while I’m not an expert, I would guess the P2P model made a lot more sense on desktop with a good connection than early smartphones on flaky 2G/3G connections. They might have had to run a client/server model for iOS and/or Android anyway.

[–] zerakith@lemmy.ml 1 points 9 months ago

Very interesting, thank you. I guess then the centralised server must have some sort of economy of scale.

In my head, I'm comparing the network to the electricity grid with certain shapes of network making different technologies more or less feasible. I would guess the internet network is probably similar to the electricity grid in most places having fewer hubs and lines of high bandwidth rather than a more evenly distributed network. Maybe the analogy is bad though.