Isn’t a torrent just, like…directly sharing a file from your PC? What’s all this business about “seeding” and “leeching”?
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Person A starts with a file that they want to share. 2 other people want the file. Person A splits the file into 2 parts, and gives each person a different part. Now Person B can give Person C the part they have, so Person C will have the whole file. Person B can get the part they need from Person A or Person C.
In a real example the file will be split into hundreds or thousands of parts, and people will start and stop sharing over time. A seeder is someone who shares file parts with other people. A leecher is someone who downloads, but doesn’t share the parts they have. Most (all?) torrent programs let you set limits on what or how fast you seed.
There are several benefits to torrents vs direct downloads: Once all the parts have been given out once, the original seeder can stop sharing and it is still possible for everyone else to get the whole file. The burden of sharing the file is distributed between all the seeders. Seeders with a faster connection can share more than a seeder with a slow one. And rather than needing one fast connection (which can be expensive), if many people share at the same time on a normal , the end user can download a lot quite quickly. Hence it is popular for distributing files like Linux .isos.
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