I wonder if there could be a torrent site that is decentralized enough that no one really has significant liability for running it, like Bittorrent itself but for the indexing/curation aspect.

[–] Mubelotix@jlai.lu 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Sorry to disappoint you, but I have an answer: yes. I created a peer-to-peer protocol for scalable, advanced and decentralized search engines. On top of this protocol, I created Admarus, a decentralized search engine for IPFS. If someone published a distributed torrent website on IPFS, it could get indexed on Admarus and could never be banned

[–] chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Seems like a cool software. I only know a little about IPFS, could that search work to search for individual pages for torrents within such a site? Can IPFS do page updates that aren't centrally controlled, ie. the initial publisher can't actually shut it down or dictate what others can put on it?

[–] Mubelotix@jlai.lu 1 points 1 year ago

Yes it allows searching for individual pages. Everyone can publish and index whatever files they want. However, they won't appear under a domain name without being added by the domain name owner. Domain name are just for humans to read though, they are not required by ipfs and admarus. Nothing prevents you from cloning a website, modifying it, and publishing it under another domain or without a domain. Content published on IPFS is immutable and lives as long as someone has it. That means many revisions of a website can exist at the same time. Domain name are practical because they are made to always point to the latest revision.

No one can dictate what can be indexed. However, ranking takes popularity into account, so that spam and unwanted content doesn't rank high