Demonii was in 2015 The most important BitTorrent trackers of P2P networks. The Demonoid-inspired service handled requests from more than 50 million peers, approximately two billion connections per day. But the fall from grace of the group that ran it, YTS, following an MPA lawsuit, ended his reign. Now he has just come back to life as we read TorrentFreak.

Trackers are a key part of the infrastructure of BitTorrent and file sharing networks in general by making it easier for downloaders and uploaders to connect with each other. Basically, they improve content sharing and are used by torrent sites. Technically speaking, trackers are similar to a DNS provider, acting as a “phone book” that pinpoints content.

Demonia’s return came as a complete surprise to most torrent users, but those who keep a close eye on the tracker connections have noticed. It turns out that many active torrents still have Demonia on their tracker list, and back in action they’re coordinating over four million pairs of streams. These millions of torrent users join nearly two million legacy torrents that were also active before the tracker was shut down.

Behind the comeback is ‘Suni’, a veteran of the BitTorrent scene and operator of smaller sites. «The tracker served its purpose. While many may argue that the loss of Demonia in 2015 wasn’t a huge deal for the ecosystem, it actually was; it was one of the most reliable torrent trackers in the world”Suni explains.

Demonii, like the original, runs on OpenTracker software, which is relatively lightweight. The tracker is currently hosted on two Debian 11 VMs from docker containers. The tracker supports IPv4 and IPv6 connections and handles approximately 300,000 active requests per minute. It must be said that this tracker does not generate any income for its operator and does not host any type of content.

BitTorrent has certainly lost users to alternatives like streaming and once bandwidth costs have dropped dramatically. However, it is still a protocol used by tens of millions of users every day. Of course, apart from the pirated content that is certainly circulating on P2P networks, BitTorrent is as legal as any other application or protocol and is a very useful alternative to a server distribution system. Or streaming.

For example, it is widely used for the distribution of GNU-Linux distributions and by large organizations such as Google, Facebook or NASA. Another example is OpenStreetMap, which offers torrent channels to download updated versions of its maps and has other uses besides files, such as VoIP applications. Legal torrents also exist and move more content than you can imagine. Trackers are key.