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PrivTracker – Private BitTorrent tracker for everyone

by prvt on 1/11/25, 8:49 AM with 37 comments

• by diggan on 1/11/25, 4:16 PM

  Worth noting if someone uses this to share private data: Checking the "Private torrent" would tell your and compliant clients to not use DHT and other public methods that can leak the content. But it doesn't stop other non-compliant clients from sharing it on the DHT once they have it, nor does it stop someone from just ticking "Enable DHT" on their side once they have received it (or change "private" to "false" in the torrent file itself).

  Obvious to many I'm sure, but maybe best to be explicit about it anyways.

  Slightly off-topic but kind of fitting: How does infohash v2 support look like today? It's been available for years, but seemingly most private trackers + most other places seems to still be using v1. What clients are people using today, do those support v2? As far as I know, all modern clients do, so it would be possible to start using v2 exclusively.

  Reason for the question is that I'm planning to distribute many large files to the public, and in my experience, BitTorrent works really well for that. Question is if it's enough to just publish v2 infohashes, or I need to publish both v1 and v2.

• by frizlab on 1/11/25, 3:03 PM

  Love this. I continue to believe Torrenting is the best way to share files, particularly big files, rather than uploading them to some cloud instance with questionable privacy policies…

• by Pooge on 1/11/25, 3:20 PM

  Is there a self-hostable BitTorrent tracker that can run with Docker? I know there's an option on qBittorrent but I don't want my server to run a full BitTorrent client; just the tracker.

• by franczesko on 1/11/25, 3:23 PM

  P2P is such an underrated tech

• by loganhood on 1/11/25, 8:30 PM

  Does a private tracker provide any meaningful security if I'm already encrypting the contents of the torrent?

• by beardog on 1/11/25, 3:39 PM

  Remember to disable the dht if you use this.

• by cbg0 on 1/11/25, 3:22 PM

  For the less technically inclined folks that don't trust this hosted service or can't host their own it's probably simpler to just use a seedbox if you need to access torrented files from multiple locations or you want to share them with others.