Yes they do. See: bittorrent and webtorrent-based streaming services.
My friend uses private trackers and his download speeds are unbelievable. But even on public trackers the download speeds are quite good. It does not take that many seeders to serve even a giant video file like an HD film, because even if upload speeds are a fraction of download speeds, the total upload bandwidth will be multiplied by the number of seeders. In fact, even an adequately-seeded torrent is orders of magnitudes faster to download than a youtube video or HTTP file for example.
People like to keep backups of their favorite creator's works. On youtube, when a popular youtube video is taken down, it will usually be reuploaded by fans. From this, we can probably surmise that maybe 1/100000 viewers will archive a given video. That's basically enough to keep a video alive forever on bittorrent, even throughout times of peak viewership as downloaders will also seed the chunks that they have.
> Yes they do. See: bittorrent and webtorrent-based streaming services.
No, people do not have crazy upload bandwidth. A private BitTorrent tracker group is immaterial. They're maintaining ad hoc infrastructure just by leaving a machine on 24/7 and maintaining favorable U/D ratios. Many groups also maintain seed boxes.
This doesn't apply to the population at large. Most people are on phones or laptops on WiFi. They're not running 24/7 and in the case of phones a background service isn't even viable. Many people are on CGNAT and can't "serve" data without some intermediary infrastructure.
As for retention, that's a pipe dream. A torrent more than a few years old may as well not exist unless it is extremely popular and maintains its popularity. There's innumerable dead torrents with no seeders.
>This doesn't apply to the population at large. Most people are on phones or laptops on WiFi. They're not running 24/7 and in the case of phones a background service isn't even viable.
They don't need to serve 24/7, they just need to be available 24/7. Do people not have their phones on and connected to the internet 24/7 in case they receive a message? For social media, most people just share text posts, pictures or a few small videos. BitTorrent is a worst-case scenario where it would be only used for large files like movies.
>Many people are on CGNAT and can't "serve" data without some intermediary infrastructure.
There are ways to get around CGNAT without STUN/TURN.
>As for retention, that's a pipe dream. A torrent more than a few years old may as well not exist unless it is extremely popular and maintains its popularity. There's innumerable dead torrents with no seeders.
This is desirable behavior in social media. Popular content will have longer retention, unpopular content will have shorter retention. Web forums like this one emulate a "fake" version of this with the weighted voting/time system that favors upvoted posts and disfavors old posts.
> Do people not have their phones on and connected to the internet 24/7 in case they receive a message?
A device able to receive a notification is not the same as listening on a socket 24/7. Push notifications on mobile go through the platform's push notification system lest they kill the device's battery. A push notification doesn't wake up a device and power up all the radios to stream masses of data.
Apps on mobile devices can be killed at any time, they're extremely unreliable as servers of content. Laptops are little better as servers of content.
I don't understand why you'd want social media content to only favor popular and recent content. Why would you want a built-in memory hole in the system?
My friend uses private trackers and his download speeds are unbelievable. But even on public trackers the download speeds are quite good. It does not take that many seeders to serve even a giant video file like an HD film, because even if upload speeds are a fraction of download speeds, the total upload bandwidth will be multiplied by the number of seeders. In fact, even an adequately-seeded torrent is orders of magnitudes faster to download than a youtube video or HTTP file for example.
People like to keep backups of their favorite creator's works. On youtube, when a popular youtube video is taken down, it will usually be reuploaded by fans. From this, we can probably surmise that maybe 1/100000 viewers will archive a given video. That's basically enough to keep a video alive forever on bittorrent, even throughout times of peak viewership as downloaders will also seed the chunks that they have.