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Distribution tools for card pics

PostPosted: 04 May 2017, 06:45
by talarasbattalion
I've seen that MEGA and torrents are used currently and would just like to throw in another tool that might be interesting:

datproject-org

It supports the following things that might useful in the context of this database:

- Distributed seeding (once you downloaded you can also share with others requesting the same data)
- Changing of datasets (a problem people noted about torrents)
- Efficient versioning of changes (changes are clearly marked and everyone can track them)
- It's all open source and Dats are under the control of their authors

The people behind it are interested in creating a tool for data-preservation and sharing and that seems to be exactly what is being done here too.

I created a "Dat" for the Eventide expansion so you can give it a try if you feel like. (Note downsides listed below.)

dat://f6b2eacf60457051a71ee7e5f5221f443 ... 93005f7dfd

Note that this is one "dat" per set/expansion but you could equally create one dat combining all sets. One thing worth noting in that regard is that dats can only be edited by their creators currently so you end up.

There are a few downsides as well:
- there's not yet a good user experience for downloading full dats without installing the Dat client (which currently is only available for Linux & Mac). This might be a big deal now but these things will get addressed eventually so I think it might still be a worthwhile thing to explore.
- similar to torrents, if there's no seeder the content cannot be downloaded.

Another interesting alternative might be IPFS (ipfs-io) but editing & versioning are not as first-class there.

Either way just some random thoughts :) If anyone is interested in exploring this I think the kind of database you have created here would be a great use case for these new distributed tools.