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The world's oldest active torrent file turns 18 this month and is still being seeded by dozens of people. The torrent "The Fanimatrix" was published in 2003 when BitTorrent was still a relatively new protocol. At the time, the torrent creator saw it as the only affordable option to share the Matrix fan movie with the world.
BitTorrent is an excellent distribution mechanism, but for a file to live, at least one person must continue to share it.
This means that most torrents eventually die after the public loses interest. However, some torrents seem to live forever.
The Fanimatrix
The oldest surviving torrent we can identify is a copy of the Matrix fan movie "Fanimatrix. "The torrent was created in September 2003, which means that this month it will turn 18. A remarkable achievement.
The movie was filmed by a group of friends from New Zealand. With a limited budget of just $ 800, almost half of which was spent on a leather jacket, they managed to complete the project in nine days.
While it was possible to shoot the movie with these financial constraints, sharing it with the world was more of a challenge. At that time there were no free video sharing services and YouTube had not yet been invented.
There is no money to distribute
Hosting the movie on a private server was not an option either. Bandwidth was still very expensive, especially in New Zealand. For the project to be a success, friends would have to pay many thousands of extra dollars to distribute it.
It was then that one of the friends, Sebastian Kai Frost, went looking for other options. Frost had a small role in the movie and also acted as the "IT guy." After looking for solutions, he finally came across a new technology called BitTorrent.
โIt looked promising because it scaled in such a way that the more popular the file became, the more the bandwidth load was shared. It seemed like the perfect solution, โFrost told us. earlier.
BitTorrent to the rescue
This was exactly what was needed to publish Fanimatrix around the world. So after Frost got the green light from the rest of the team, he created a torrent on September 28, 2003. To make sure everything ran smoothly, he also ran his own crawler from a Linux box.
The Fanimatrix turned out to be a great success. In the first week alone, 70,000 people obtained a copy of the film. This is a great achievement, especially considering that BitTorrent was not that popular or easy to use back then.
With BitTorrent, the film crew easily saved hundreds of thousands of dollars in distribution costs. It was the perfect use case for how technology could help freelance creators.
Preserving Internet history
Today, there are many free 'instant streaming' options available that make BitTorrent look silly. However, it's great to see that Fanimatrix is โโstill being shared after all these years. It is now part of the history of the Internet.
And with him fourth installment of The Matrix Slated to premiere later this year, the project may also gain some additional traction.
TorrentFreak spoke with Frost this week, who doubled down on his previous promise to keep the Fanimatrix site and torrent up and running for as long as possible. He has even taken some precautions, in case of an early departure from this world.
The original Fanimatrix site went offline for a while, but Frost restored it years ago and plan to keep it online for as long as possible. The crew is also considering a special celebration in two years, when the two-decade mark is passed.
