this post was submitted on 07 Mar 2026
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Hello fellow TCP users.

I am currently having a lot of unused bandwidth. I wonder do you have any suggestion what to do with that bandwidth ?. Ideally it should more or less only relay the traffic because unfortunately I don't have much idle RAM left (something like a Tor-relay node but least risky).

Thank you very much!

Edit: If you have any not so heavy torrent (<250GiB) that could be helpful please suggest as well.

Edit: Thank you for all the options you've suggested:

  • archiveteam warrior
  • tor relay/snowflae
  • syncthing relay
  • i2p
  • radicle
  • peertube
  • seeding torrents

I will try to explore them. Thank you very much!

top 23 comments
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[–] xxce2AAb@feddit.dk 51 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Linux installer ISO images. Perfectly legal, and very helpful.

[–] SlurpingPus@lemmy.world 6 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

Torrents for the popular distros have lots of peers, so another seeder wouldn't be adding much.

I avoid downloading isos via torrent, because when I tried, the client straight up froze for a while, dealing with over a thousand peers and sorting out connections.

[–] xana@lemmy.zip 1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Yeah it is true but seeding torrents to sature bandwith is generally a good idea

[–] SlurpingPus@lemmy.world 2 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

As a seasoned torrenter myself, I don't observe the ‘≥1 ratio’ rule, but instead delete torrents that have enough seeders and keep those which have just a few. This maximizes utility for those who might want the same torrents as I did.

Of course, this inevitably runs into lack of endless disk space rather than bandwidth. And if you seed something other than Linux, you might want to research the authorities' attitude toward that in your area.

I just don’t tend to delete torrents at all. I have torrents going all the way back to when I built my current server, almost two years ago. Just set your bandwidth caps, and let the torrent client manage what to seed. Some of my shit is only like .1 ratio because it’s not popular or there are lots of other seeds… But I have a few others that have ratios in the literal hundreds. I think my most popular torrent is a PSX ISO bundle for emulators, and it’s currently sitting at a ratio of like 350.

[–] xana@lemmy.zip 11 points 4 days ago (1 children)

A very good idea indeed. Do you mean via torrent or is there any way to host it ?

[–] xxce2AAb@feddit.dk 8 points 4 days ago (2 children)

I had torrents in mind. You could host them directly I suppose, but discoverability would be an issue.

[–] IsoKiero@sopuli.xyz 17 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Discoverability is one issue and trust for longevity is another. No bigger distribution is going to rely their official download links on an individual home lab which can disappear overnight. Also I guess there's also guestion if images are provided as is without adding/removing your own 'extensions', but that's what cheksums are for.

And this is obviously on a general level, I'm not trying to suggest that xana is not trustworthy :) But torrent seeding is a helpful thing for community, and easy/safe to set up.

[–] xana@lemmy.zip 5 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

No worry you can not trust a random guy on the internet in general. But one issue I see with torrent is I will have to update the torrent manually everytime a new version comes out. I wonder if you know any automatic solution for that ?

[–] IsoKiero@sopuli.xyz 5 points 4 days ago

I'd guess there's some tools which rely on RSS feeds or something to update seeds automatically, but that's just a gut feeling. Also it shouldn't be too difficult to write your own, but I don't know if anything 'production ready' is out there.

[–] xana@lemmy.zip 3 points 4 days ago

You could consider peertube, although I am not terribly familiar with the hardware load

[–] kylian0087@lemmy.dbzer0.com 12 points 4 days ago

Look in to I2P.

[–] linuxguy@piefed.ca 7 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Why not a tor relay? If you're not an exit it is pretty darn safe. How about a tor snowflake proxy too? Even easier and safer.

[–] Maroon@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago

I am in the process of doing this as well. The world needs more TOR relays, now more than ever!

[–] hexagonwin@lemmy.today 6 points 3 days ago

archiveteam warrior

A Syncthing relay, very simple to set up, I always install it when I have no need for a VPS but it's paid for until the end of the month

[–] harmbugler@piefed.social 7 points 4 days ago

I2P outproxy or seeding torrents

[–] Nibodhika@lemmy.world 4 points 3 days ago (1 children)

What do you mean unused bandwidth? Is that not the normal? Most of the time I'm not using my bandwidth so I guess I have lots of unused bandwidth too.

[–] xana@lemmy.zip 5 points 3 days ago

Well I've already paid for it so why not saturate it for the good of the community :D

[–] Decronym@lemmy.decronym.xyz 4 points 4 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters More Letters
DNS Domain Name Service/System
IP Internet Protocol
NAT Network Address Translation

3 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 6 acronyms.

[Thread #144 for this comm, first seen 7th Mar 2026, 09:30] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

[–] inari@piefed.zip 1 points 3 days ago
[–] talkingpumpkin@lemmy.world 2 points 3 days ago

I've not looked into it much yet, but https://radicle.xyz/ seems interesting.

It's kinda a bittorrent-powerd codeberg and it looks like it's worth playing around with (even though it might not get you rid of much bandwidth... IDK how popular it is, but source usually doesn't weigh that much).