I actually ran a very-short-lived private use tracker briefly, for some exploration doing p2p watch partying. But it was a toy, never got serious enough to look deeper at how the tracker worked (was using the rust Aquatic tracker, which kindly added webtorrent support on request! https://github.com/greatest-ape/aquatic )
Does the tracker know what it's tracking? Is there any attempt to make the tracker unaware of what peer rendezvous it's doing?
My gut is that it seems some kind of hash/magnet that folks are asking to peers on. And that the magnet itself is sufficient, and doesn't have to include anything identifying (although I believe many magnet links included some human readable description). The tracker could likely try to download this hash from the peer itself, to get the torrent info, but wouldn't really know what the torrent is or what's in it without doing the download itself.
Does that check out? How much of the magnet link is key to rendezvous? Could a tracker ignore human friendly fields, block them at ingress, to shield it's eyes?
replies(2):