> What's more interesting to me is using BitTorrent not for pirated movies but as a content distribution system enabling more free services like Wikipedia.

That should be much higher in Wikimedia's TODO list, IMHO. There is a browser extension called WikipediaP2P for chrome, but if I'm not mistaken the author is not affiliated with the Wikimedia foundation and it's only for chrome.

I donated money once to the foundation so now I receive emails from times to times, asking for more money. It nags me when I read the claim that they need money to pay for servers and yet they don't seem to make any effort to distribute Wikipedia in a P2P way.

But do note that hosting is actually only a very small percentage of where money goes.

In 2017, Wikimedia received ~87M in donations while only ~2M were spent on hosting. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/d/da/Wikim...

What the hell? Why do they need my money if they have 50 Million dollars in cash or cash equivalents? Am I reading that right?

And who the hell are their employees that are getting paid 33 million dollars a year? How many employees are there?

EDIT: Reading a related comment's linked OP-ed, it appears that the Wikimedia Foundation spends a lot of money on non-wikipedia things. That is disturbing to me. I would like to donate to Wikipedia, not Wikimedia. Wikimedia may or may not be worthwile (I'm simply not familiar), but it isn't where I want my money to go.

They have ~300 employees. So 33M is not a crazy price to pay. ~110k USD/employee/year. Considering the industry they're in (information and tech) this is totally reasonable.

Otherwise no big deal that it may or may not fit your values to donate to Wikimedia.

Not crazy, no, but surprising that they have ~300 employees.

Somone I went to college work works there

Wikipedia has cancer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...

https://datproject.org/ with https://beakerbrowser.com/ or the upcoming Firefox extension is the most currently-promising project in this space.

A bit similar to Opera Unite circa 2009:

http://www.operasoftware.com/press/releases/general/opera-un...

> That should be much higher in Wikimedia's TODO list, IMHO

Wikipedia's TODO list has only one item: beg for more funding

I volunteer myself and some of my servers to run software to support Wikipedia, Sci-Hub, The Pirate Bay etc if I can do it and have some safeties in place: - Everything encrypted all the time, I have none of the keys - ... I guess I'd just want to be reassured I'm legally and practically safe.

Are there any projects like this already?

In another thread someone mentioned PopcorntimeXSci-hub which sounds about right with maybe some Tor sprinkled in, and I have seen http://sciencefair-app.com/ (Encouraging but very early).

Would you run encrypted hosting for Wikipedia|Sci-Hub|PirateBay?

Built on the dat project https://datproject.org/ - my little finger tells me dat will take bittorrent's P2P place in the not too distant future.

It's written on NodeJS. I have a very hard time believing in a systems project written in JavaScript.

Advertising generally scales linearly with distribution and bandwidth is cheap. You can make money serving 100 Megabyte files files with a few banner ads, so I don't think bit torrent really enables much in that context.

You're right that bandwidth is cheap, so in some ways BitTorrent was made (partially) obsolete simply by availability of cheap bandwidth. But ads are not necessarily desirable for something like Open Access. And generally speaking, I think we should encourage empowered decentralization wherever possible.

One thing a peer-to-peer architecture for Open Access distribution could enable would be the ability to put a whole bunch of experiment data and supporting documentation online for cheap/free as part of the journal article. Part of the reason it's difficult to replicate some scientific results is lack of access to the data and poor documentation. A series of photos and video of the experiment, access to the full experimental data set was never practical for traditional journals, is expensive to do with traditional Open Access as the researchers would have to pay the hosting fees (indirectly as part of the publication fee), but would be trivial with a peer-to-peer distribution model for the data. It'd also allow a really easy and cheap way for enthusiasts to contribute to science by acting as seeds for non-profit open access journals.

From personal experience, I produce tens of gigabytes of supporting data, photos, and video for each experiment that never gets published, in part because justifying the hosting fee is difficult. Peer-to-peer distribution of this data as part of an open access journal article would make it a lot easier.

Doesn't the supporting data etc. go into an Institutional Repository?:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutional_repository

But you would have to host it somewhere, if only to seed

This is practically the thesis of IPFS.

It's a shame Big Browser doesn't have any intention of supporting torrents as a standard protocol.

Fortunately, new browsers such as Brave are already working on supporting IPFS and other decentralized protocols.

I believe they Firefox has opened up to answering ipfs URLs in the near future.