It's February 2021, and several of the commonly-used open torrent trackers have gone away. (RIP, Coppersurfer!)
I spent a bit going through some lists and wrote a script to run scrape requests against them. I eliminated the ones that often failed to respond; some were unreliable and some just don't seem to exist anymore.
A few things to note first:
- I genuinely don't recommend using any of these for doing anything illegal. Public trackers are low-hanging fruit for lawyers to find copyright infringers.
- All of these are UDP-based. This was not intentional–I included both HTTP-based and UDP-based trackers. None of the HTTP-based ones responded reliably or could meet the 2-second timeout my script imposed. UDP is faster for you and less overhead for the tracker operators.
- I strongly recommend enabling peer exchange (PEX) and distributed hash table (DHT) to find more peers. I have seen cases where most of my peers in a swarm were located this way.
- Most UDP tracker URLs are typically shown with
/announceon the end. It is unused! BEP41 would give it meaning, but it's not necessary for announce URLs. I've omitted it because it serves no purpose.
In the list below, I show the sum of peers returned from a handful of queries. As an absolute number, it's meaningless; it's a sampling of some random content. But it's useful as a relative metric. Here is the list, sorted from most peers to least:
udp://tracker.opentrackr.org:1337– 4,441 peers for the searches I ran. Public stats show that it's handling something like 300,000 connections per second, which is bonkers. Apparently located in the Netherlands.udp://tracker.internetwarriors.net:1337– 2,773 peers. Apparently located in Chile.udp://exodus.desync.com:6969– 2,169 peers. Apparently located in USA.udp://tracker.cyberia.is:6969– 1,944 peers. Website. Apparently located in Ukraine.udp://opentracker.i2p.rocks:6969– 820 peers. Apparently located in the US.udp://explodie.org:6969– 764 peers. Website. Apparently located in the US.udp://open.stealth.si:80– 223 peers. Apparently located in Norway.udp://tracker.tiny-vps.com:6969– 210 peers. Apparently located in Russia.udp://tracker.torrent.eu.org:451– 200 peers. Apparently located in France.udp://retracker.lanta-net.ru:2710– 197 peers. Apparently located in Russia.
I found more, but they're all at less than 5% the number of peers discovered in my queries than the #1 entry so I don't find them particularly useful.