This could be semi interesting for some torrents if it had CoW local store? So you could still write to it but keep your changes local and it still looks like a coherent directory.
got it. but now i kind of want a torrent-based dropbox. i have five workstations. would be great to be able to utilize them as my own miniature distributed file system without a corporate server.
Syncthing is great (I use it daily!) but I'm not sure it does the Dropbox/NextCloud thing that BTFS does where you can see remote files and download them on access. Syncthing rather just syncs folders as far as I can tell.
There have been a bunch of projects that tried to do some variant this, and I'd love for it to exist, but I'd almost posit it's an impossible problem. Projects either find a way to handle the content-addressing, but then fail on coordinating nodes, or can coordinate but can't choose placement efficiently, or are just vaporware. I think the hard part is most personal computers are too unreliable to trust, and centralization, even for a homelab experimental user, is just too easy.
A few projects that tackled some version of this...
Nextcloud, Owncloud, and generally just NAS can be "dropbox but self hosted" but its centralized.
IPFS, Perkeep, Iroh, hypercore (npm), focused on content-addressed information, making cataloging and sharing easy, but fail to really handle coordination of which node the data goes on.
Syncthing, Garage, and of course BitTorrent, and a few others can coordinate but they all duplicate everything everywhere.
"Bazil.org", and (dead link) "infinit.sh" both sought to coordinate distribution and somehow catalog the data, but they both seem to have died without achieving their goals. I used infinit.sh when it was alive ~2016 but it was too slow to use for anything.
I'd love for something like this to exist, but I think its an impossible mission.
...wow, kind of fascinating. wish there was a post-mortem on failed attempts at this. I would not expect this, of all problems, to be unsolvable in 2024.
There used to be something that worked exactly in this manner, called AeroFS -- There was a website portion that worked just like Dropbox did, and then a client you could install on your systems, and it would distribute items in a torrent-like manner between clients. It had a lot of neat features. It's a shame that it didn't end up really going anywhere (in a very crowded field at the time), because it worked great and they had an on-prem solution that worked really well.
There are families of distributed filesystems. Most famous would be Ceph and GlusterFS and there are a many newer ones - maybe one of them would fit your use-case?
