this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2025
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Hey, so I have recently bought a raspberry pi 4 to use as a selfhosted Nextcloud and Immich server. I also thought about other stuff, I could host on there when I am not using the processing power and bandwidth and I came to the conclusion that I could seed legal torrents (I live in Germany, so I can afford no risks), that are ideally helping humanitarian projects (something like linux distros or open science data. Do you guys have some good ideas for where I could look for torrents that can effectively help people?

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[–] zarathustra0@lemmy.world 74 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

Kiwix - they have downloads of various educational resources including subsets of Wikipedia which can be taken on a USB-stick to far off remote places that don't have reliable internet access.

You can find the available downloads at library.kiwix.org

[–] Zachariah@lemmy.world 43 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Archive.org has a bunch that you can help with.

[–] bacon_pdp@lemmy.world 16 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Especially the pbs kids shows that the GOP is trying to cancel and ban.

[–] paraphrand@lemmy.world 8 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Ban? Like, making possession illegal? Like, they will be wiped from YouTube?

[–] bacon_pdp@lemmy.world 5 points 5 days ago

Yep, a 2TB external drive is enough to hold all of it

[–] JoeKrogan@lemmy.world 36 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

Tor (Tails Iso), other linux isos, internet archive stuff in public domain

[–] oplkill@lemmy.world 1 points 5 days ago (2 children)

Isn't tor risky with police?

[–] JRaccoon@discuss.tchncs.de 15 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Not really, as long as you don't run an exit node

[–] oplkill@lemmy.world 4 points 5 days ago (2 children)

But what if exit node was captured by police and they will get next node and etc

[–] JRaccoon@discuss.tchncs.de 13 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Running a Tor relay, even an exit node, is not illegal in most jurisdictions. However, exit node operators may receive a large number of abuse reports and legal threats, which they must properly answer to avoid further trouble and that's why it's not recommended for the individuals to run an exit node.

For those living under authoritarian regimes where Tor might be illegal, the risks are obviously significantly greater.

[–] Flax_vert@feddit.uk 4 points 5 days ago (2 children)

For those living under authoritarian regimes

Is the UK in that category?

[–] bizzle@lemmy.world 3 points 5 days ago

I'm trying to think of one single world government that isn't brutal authoritarians

[–] JRaccoon@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 5 days ago

Depends who you ask I guess, but at least Tor isn't illegal there, is it?

[–] EmptySodaCan@lemmy.world 2 points 5 days ago

You're either trolling, or fundamentally don't understand how tor works. Exit nodes carry all the risk as they are the only ones who know what the exit traffic is. Every node before that is encrypted and doesn't know anything other than the next node. Police can capture an exit node all they want, its of no legal concern to the guard and middle if they do. The guard is the only one that knows the originating IP address. There are flaws in tor, don't get me wrong. But that's not one of them.

[–] JoeKrogan@lemmy.world 3 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

Sorry I wrote with haste (Updated my original comment), I meant to say Tails which for those who dont know is an anonymous linux live OS that is preconfigured to use Tor. So I was talking about seeding the Tails disto img.

As for Tor and running a node , it depends on the country. I have been running a non exit node for years with no issues in Europe.

[–] Quik@infosec.pub 37 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Debian Trixie just released, so...

Yup just started seeding the 64-bit PC DVD .iso since I figured I'd need it sooner or later, the .torrent links are listed there in the Debian download page https://www.debian.org/distrib/

And of course plenty of other Linux distros have their own torrent links.

[–] dragnucs@lemmy.ml 26 points 6 days ago

Linux ISO, wikipedia and maybe even Openstreetmap.

[–] iAmTheTot@sh.itjust.works 24 points 6 days ago

Linux distros often have torrents for their ISOs.

[–] neidu3@sh.itjust.works 22 points 6 days ago (1 children)

I'm building this hosting service and while testing the torrent aspect of it I uploaded the Linux mint torrent and I've been seeing it ever since.

In general, most large FOSS torrents benefit from additional seeders (although I don't think many are in lack thereof). Beyond that, I think I vaguely remember wikipedia and internet archive having a torrent component.

[–] BurgerBaron@piefed.social 11 points 6 days ago (1 children)

There's no warning anywhere saying so, but torrents have been broken on archive.org for years now. I can't remember the specifics but many torrents if IA is the only seed you'll get stuck at 99.9% and it'll never complete.

Infuriating.

[–] BennyTheExplorer@lemmy.world 7 points 5 days ago

Yeah, it's like that for some torrents, but some also work fine. And the ones that don't work, you can revive by manually downloading the zip file from their servers, I guess.

[–] 9point6@lemmy.world 13 points 5 days ago

Linux ISOs

Depending on your jurisdiction, popular torrents on archive.org

[–] Player2@sopuli.xyz 10 points 5 days ago (2 children)
[–] SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 18 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Not exactly legal as OP requested

[–] TriflingToad@sh.itjust.works 15 points 5 days ago (2 children)

if Facebook can torrent books and get away with it I should be able to too

[–] SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 9 points 5 days ago (1 children)

True, but that's still not how it works since we have a multi-tiered justice system where corporations are basically able to get away with whatever.

[–] TriflingToad@sh.itjust.works 5 points 5 days ago

fair enough

[–] JackbyDev@programming.dev 3 points 5 days ago

OP is asking about seeding though, and wasn't the whole Facebook debacle that they never seeded so they got away with it or something? Because they never "distributed" anything?

Nothing legal about Anna's Archive content.

[–] ace_garp@lemmy.world 11 points 5 days ago

The large wikipedia(and others datasets) .slob files used for AARD2 and other offline readers.

https://github.com/itkach/slob/wiki

[–] Geodad@lemmy.world 8 points 5 days ago

Your favorite Linux distro.

Wikipedia zim