Tribler is a social community that facilitates filesharing through a peer-to-peer (p2p) network. When the Tribler application program is started it will automatically start searching other users that have Tribler running on their computer. When a connection is established it starts exchanging information. First it exchanges personal information (such as your avatar picture, your friends list, download history, etc.) and information about files that are available in the network. These files can be personal, shared files, but also files that one has received from another person.

The information about the discovered files and persons is available in the Tribler program. By browsing through the files and persons each user can find their preferred files and users. The Tribler program helps you by giving extra information about each item (whether it is a file or a person) and also shows what other users think about it. When you find a person you like you can add him as a friend. An interesting file can be downloaded and will be available in your library. When you press download your computer will make an inventory of which computers actually have this file (or a part of it) and then will download the parts from the different computers.

Features

  • Search box with suggestions
  • Anti-spam features
  • Video-on-demand support
  • Fully distributed

What's New

  • Fix network name is no longer available error on 7.13 by @xoriole in #7912

We are excited to announce Tribler 7.13.1, a bugfix release that notably enhances the stability of Tribler, especially during startup. This update addresses several critical issues, including problems related to Tribler startup, database corruption, and various other bugs. Our team has worked diligently to ensure a smoother and more reliable experience for our users.

Startup stability fixes

  • #7603: Use the filelock library to determine the primary process by @kozlovsky in #7660
  • Use dedicated exit codes when another primary GUI/Core process is running by @kozlovsky in #7746
  • #7592: Fix Core crash caused by TimeoutError when REST HTTP server is starting by @kozlovsky in #7617
  • #7641: Fix TypeError in StartDownloadDialog during Tribler UI startup by @drew2a in #7662

Database Integrity

  • #5252: Handle the database corruption error by regenerating the corrupted database on the fly by @kozlovsky in #7628

General stability fixes

  • Use the default event loop on Windows by @qstokkink in #7677
  • Reconnect to the Core in case of EventReqestManager disconnection by @kozlovsky in #7747
  • #7602 Fix race condition in SlowCoroWatchingThread by @kozlovsky in #7613
  • #7600: Handle exceptions in task.print_stack() by @kozlovsky in #7614
  • #7598: Use safe_repr function to display alert reprs by @kozlovsky in #7616
  • #7056: Return RESTResponse error for timed out metainfo request by @drew2a in #7627
  • #7670: Removed circuit from peer_info by @egbertbouman in #7700

Localization robustness

  • #7599: Fix TypeError when the translated string does not have the correct number of positional parameters by @kozlovsky in #7615

Introducing the Knowledge Component: A Leap Towards Decentralized Search Excellence

Google's power resides in its PageRank algorithm. Creating a decentralized alternative to Big Tech has proven challenging, but with this release, we take another small step on this journey. Our ultimate goal is to achieve self-organizing trust, the fundamental building block for a decentralized PageRank system. The concrete use-case we aim to address is collective decision-making in the peer-to-peer world, such as determining whether Justin Bieber is gay.

Is Justin Bieber gay?

Explore the details of this scientifically serious issue related to trust, spam, and crowdsourcing. For the record, we believe Justin Bieber's music is neither Black Metal nor gay. We consider this an exemplary use-case for Tribler's zero-trust architecture to solve. Our distributed trust ledger has been under incremental development since before Bitcoin. We have not yet deployed our decentralized reputation and trust framework, as our MeritRank algorithm is still not ready for production. However, we have upgraded the BitTorrent tag-based metadata enrichment from pure text labels into the KnowledgeComponent (#7070). As a test, we offer semantic clustering within Tribler when searching for "Ubuntu," providing cleaner search results and filtering duplicates.

No other peer-to-peer project, such as IPFS, Mojo Nation, or Freenet, has ever cracked semantic search. With the KnowledgeComponent, we take another challenging step towards a Google-quality search engine. It signifies a move towards semantics, a search engine that understands your preferences and helps you discover content without interference from lawyers or governments.

Creative Commons licensed promotional picture:

Enhanced Torrent Health: Accurate Sharing Between Peers

Tribler peers exchange information about torrent popularity, allowing torrents with a substantial number of seeders to appear on the "Popular" page and receive priority in search results. We identified several critical bugs (#7295) in the previous algorithm, causing invalid torrent health records to spread across the network and skew the results on the "Popular" page. These bugs have now been fixed, and the gossiping algorithm has been optimized for efficient sharing of popular torrents (#6950).

Improved Stability for a Smoother Experience

This release of Tribler is set to be the most stable in recent times. Our development team has successfully identified and resolved numerous obscure bugs that previously led to crashes and freezes. We're confident that this version of Tribler will impress you with its enhanced stability and reliability.