a.scarywater.net

» see a.scarywater.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

By the time the line at my house was good enough to make BitTorrent worth starting, around 2006 on TTNet ADSL, scarywater had already been running for four years. That is the part people forget about it. Bram Cohen had released BitTorrent in July 2001 and scarywater was tracking torrents fifteen months later, back when the protocol was a curiosity a few thousand people had heard of and the word "seeding" had not yet escaped into normal speech.

It started as wirebrain.de, a personal server in Germany, and it did one thing: it ran the tracker for anime fansub groups. A group would finish subtitling an episode, announce it on their site or on IRC, and the torrent would point at scarywater. The site itself was close to nothing to look at. Lists of files, a lot of numbers, none of the login walls or upload ratios that the private trackers built later. You did not have an account there because there was nothing to have an account for.

More than 300 million downloads went through it before it stopped. For a single-purpose site with no company behind it and no revenue, run in one person's spare hours, that number is close to absurd. The English-speaking fansub scene was never a place I spent time. Which forums you read in 2004 decided a great deal more than which country you were reading them from, and mine were Turkish hardware boards where the torrents in circulation were games and albums.

~ the record ~

~ the plumbing ~

A tracker in 2002 was not a website in any sense we would recognize now. It was a small program that kept a list of who currently had which pieces of which file and told new arrivals where to ask. It did not host anything. It did not index anything for search. It answered one question over and over, very fast, for free.

That is why scarywater could carry 300 million downloads on hardware nobody would call a data center. The bandwidth was everyone else's. What the operator paid for was the small constant hum of the tracker itself, which was cheap enough to absorb in 2003 and became less cheap every year the file sizes went up.

~ the goodbye note ~

The announcement went up on 4 March 2010. The reason given was lack of time and money to keep maintaining the site, with a closing date of 12 March, and a line about how seven years in internet time is very close to an eternity. Nobody raided it and no rights holder ever put out a statement claiming a win.

The server stayed reachable for a while after the deadline but stopped accepting new torrents, so the fansub groups drifted off to other trackers over the following weeks. That is a gentler ending than almost any of its contemporaries got. Suprnova went down under legal pressure, Demonoid got squeezed out of two countries, and scarywater just got tired.

~ the next chapter ~

What replaced it was Nyaa, which launched in 2005 and absorbed most of the anime torrent traffic through the 2010s before its owner took it down on 1 May 2017. The model changed on the way across: an index with search and comments rather than a bare tracker, a site you visited rather than a URL that lived inside somebody else's announcement post.

scarywater.net does not resolve at all now, which is rarer than it sounds. Most dead sites of that era at least kept a squatter. This one took the domain down with it.

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