I for the first time got to know about web seeds, these seed at maximum download speed your device can handle (like usenet) and if the torrent has no seeders at all these can be useful. I have seen their use in https://archive.org/ when I was downloading a Librivox audiobook. What are the disadvantages of web seeds? Would the government be able to shut these down with relative ease as unlike normal seeders, they are centralized. Also, is there a way to use these? I mean, is there a service which will seed through web seeds what I don’t want to be seen seeding?
PS: Librivox is a free audio book site for books in public domain and you can legally get them after visiting their website. I love Librivox!
I think they’re fine. All a web seed is, is a direct server download to your torrent client as if you clicked “download” in your browser. It causes no damage to the torrent if they go down, although if web seeds are holding illegal content they pose much greater risks to those hosting them.
They’re usually used to make the initial seeding go faster, since you can web seed to the crucial first 10 seeders very quickly via instead of piecemeal uploading the torrent to the entire peer cloud parts at a time and potentially never getting the complete torrent out for days and days.