Why isn't it possible to easily host a file over torrent in 2022?

Question

It's 2022, torrent technology has been around for 15+ years.So why is it still not trivial to host a file by torrent on a private network?If I have a set of machines behind a firewall, it's a huge pain to setup a qbittorrent instance and configure clients to use it. Even once all that is setup, the retrieval process is nothing like "wget magnet://...".To be clear, projects like aria2 (C++) and webtorrent (nodejs) do exist, but try to use them for anything production-ish grade or in an automated fashion and you'll find out they are slow to start the downloads and overall unreliable and flaky.A true "wget" -style system for seeding and downloading from a private torrent swarm would be amazing for many use cases. I'm envisioning something like a program that monitors a folder and any file that ends up in the folder gets auto-seeded to a set of private clients.What do you think?

eternityforest · Accepted Answer

My best guess is that blockchain completely destroyed all the hype surrounding traditional P2P, and things that should be trivial are nonexistent because nobody is excited enough to build them.
The real question is why are torrents still the best P2P system around? Why do we not have something like SyncThing but for mass public sharing?
The other thing that happened is new P2P projects aim to replace the current internet entirely, and don't fully take advantage of the fact we can have cheap centralized servers.
I would love to work on a project like this one day. I've done some proofs of concept for similar things, but making something practical and cross platform is a bit too much for one person.
Lately I've been wondering if true P2P is actually the way to go for a real next gen system, or if we should be getting back to a more refined version of the trackers concept.

trompetenaccoun · Answer

P2P filesharing would be the main means we share information now, if it hadn't been killed by powerful corporations and their political lobby groups. As it stands, there isn't much money in developing for pirates so the ecosystem has stagnated. Great example for how the world is controlled by those with money/power. It would be a very different world if we all freely shared files in a decentralized way instead of getting them from server farms owned by Amazon, Alphabet & co. It would be a much more democratic world where they couldn't as easily censor people as they do now.