Contribution guide
Keep the weights alive
Every mirrored model ships as a BitTorrent swarm, and swarms live or die by their seeds. The seeder daemon turns spare disk into durable hosting: it downloads the models the network needs most, verifies every file against an anchor-signed manifest, and keeps them online. This page walks you from zero to seeding — and explains how the flock recognizes the people who do it.
Before you start
- A machine that stays on — a home server, NAS, or VPS. Linux or macOS, Python 3.11+, and
qbittorrent-noxrunning. - Spare disk. Even 50 GB helps; the daemon never exceeds the budget you set.
- Comfort with the trade-offs of public swarms: peers can see your IP address, and you are redistributing models under their listed licenses.
Start seeding in four steps
Mint an access token
Seeders identify themselves with a personal read token, revocable any time. Create one under Settings → Access tokens. The token only lets the daemon read public torrent data and report its own presence — it can never publish or modify anything.
Install the daemon
# Needs Python 3.11+ and a running qbittorrent-nox
pipx install "git+https://github.com/VinnyChase28/duckweights.git#subdirectory=seeder"Join the flock
# Paste a read token from Settings -> Access tokens
export DUCKWEIGHTS_TOKEN=dw_...
export SEEDER_DATA_ROOT=~/duckweights-seeder
# Pick how much disk to donate
duckweights-seeder join --disk 100GBThe daemon reads the need queue — torrents ranked by fewest seeds — fills your disk budget starting with the most fragile swarms, verifies every file's SHA-256 against the signed manifest, and seeds. Corrupt or altered data is rejected by the protocol itself, so the only thing your box can ever serve is byte-exact weights.
Verify it worked
Within a few minutes your box appears under Settings → Seeding and on the flock leaderboard. From then on it heartbeats on its own; there is nothing to babysit.
Points and badges
Seeding credit is measured in GiB-hours: one point for every GiB of verified weights you keep online for an hour. Points accrue automatically from your daemon's heartbeats — 100 GB seeded around the clock earns roughly 2,400 points a day. Your badge appears next to your name on your profile and on every comment you post.
| Badge | Points | Roughly |
|---|---|---|
| Duckling | 0+ | Your first heartbeat — welcome to the flock |
| Paddler | 500+ | 100 GB kept online for ~5 hours |
| Keeper | 25,000+ | 1 TB kept online for a day |
| Flight Leader | 500,000+ | 1 TB kept online for ~3 weeks |
Questions people ask
- Is this safe to run?
- The daemon can only serve files whose hashes match the anchor-signed manifest, and its token cannot write anything to the catalog. The usual BitTorrent caveats apply: swarm peers see your IP, and your ISP sees BitTorrent traffic.
- What decides which models my box seeds?
- The need queue: torrents with the fewest seeds first, popularity as the tiebreaker. You donate capacity; the flock allocates it where the catalog is most fragile.
- Do downloads earn points?
- No — points reward availability, not traffic. What counts is verified GiB kept online, measured between heartbeats, so a quiet box seeding rare weights earns exactly as much as a busy one.
- How do I stop?
- Stop the daemon and delete its data directory. Your box drops off the leaderboard after 15 minutes; the points you earned are yours to keep.