Long story short, in a limited way.

If you look at the protocols available, there are two, BT and μTP.

BT needs one of two peers to have a port open to connect to, either they initiate the connection, or you initiate connection. So if you want to download Arch Linux 2024.12.01(magnet:?xt=urn:btih:265863cbbb5ed9ef39e7c891ebebdf1623b09d5e&dn=archlinux-2024.12.01-x86_64.iso), you’ll need to either connect to a seeder that has a port open, or if you have a port open the seeder can connect to you.

μTP can solve this by performing NAT traversal using UDP hole punching. The way this works is a third peer with open ports will relay information for both peers with closed ports to connect to each other.

If it is this, this Hacker News post has some information, the top comment by eastdakota is the CEO of CloudFlare: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828317

For me personally I don’t need what much of the private ones have, sure they have community which makes it appealing to some, and I sure would like to be able to talk more openly about what I’ve been up to. I wouldn’t necessarily say that all private users are elitist, more that they enjoy what they have, and it’s a form of community. If you look at the forums for the public tracker that recently went down and has since come back up, they have a sort of community that some really enjoy.

I believe in keeping much of the content free and accessible for everyone to have easy access, so much so that recently I’ve fixed up an old PC and have started maintaining content for the public. Some might call this junk, but for me, it’s about sharing the entertainment and memories that I enjoyed.