Carl: the torrent client I always wanted but couldn't find
If you've ever felt like you were renting your own privacy from a tracker, this one's for you.
# Carl: the torrent client I always wanted but couldn't find
I've been using BitTorrent for years, and one thing always bothered me. The protocol is peer-to-peer, but almost nothing around it is. You still depend on trackers and indexers to find anything, and those are the parts that get blocked, seized, or logged. Your IP is attached to every piece you download and seed. For something that is supposed to be decentralized, that always felt wrong to me.
So I started building Carl.
Carl is a small, privacy-first BitTorrent client. It started as a CLI, like most of my projects, and now I'm building a proper desktop GUI on top of it so it is not only for people who live in a terminal. The goal is to do everything a BitTorrent client should do, without leaking who you are.
## Finding torrents without trackers
The first difference is how you find torrents. Instead of relying on a few indexers, Carl finds and publishes them over Nostr (NIP-35). Every torrent is a signed event, so you can check who published it and which relays carried it. No account, no login, and nothing central that can be taken down. You query the relays directly, and publishing is basically one command. Pretty neat, right?
## Not leaking your IP
The second difference is anonymity. I wanted Tor to be first-class here, not an afterthought. You can download over Tor, and you can also seed as a Tor hidden service, which is the part I like most. Your files live behind a .onion address and your IP never touches the wire. When you seed this way, Carl turns off tracker and DHT announces by design, and it tells you clearly that it did. There is no "trust me" here, you can see the real state on screen.
## Privacy you can actually see
One small detail that matters to me. Most clients hide routing deep in a settings menu. Carl puts a badge on every transfer (clearnet, proxied, or tor) so you always know how something is routed without going to look for it. Three ways to find peers (trackers, DHT, Nostr) and three ways to route them (direct, proxy, Tor), labeled the same way everywhere.
There are also no accounts, because there is no server. Your identity is just a local Nostr keypair that never leaves your machine.
## Where it's at
Carl is still early. The CLI works today and the GUI is coming together. I'm sharing it now because if you care about this kind of thing, your feedback is what I need before going further.
Ask your agent to install Carl for you and to teach you how to use it:
GitHub
GitHub - vincenzopalazzo/carl: Carl is a BitTorrent light client that preserves the privacy of the common user without requiring be Mr. Robot! ofc it is compliant with https://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0000.html
Carl is a BitTorrent light client that preserves the privacy of the common user without requiring be Mr. Robot! ofc it is compliant with https://ww...
