That’s the question really. I hear the terms metadata and torrents thrown around all the time when talking about internet and privacy, but I don’t really understand them and when I tried googling torrents I was just confused. Can someone explain one or both like I’m 5?
Metadata is “data about data”, so if your post is the data, the author, when it was posted, which community it was posted in will count as it’s metadata.
Torrents are a way of distributing files between computers. Without going into the details, everyone who downloads also ends up being an uploader (known as seeders/seeding). Compared to “traditional” direct downloads this makes it both faster (as you can download different parts from multiple uploaders at the same time which makes things a bit more efficient), more resillient (as anyone who has a complete download (or partial enough that you can stitch a whole file from multiple sources) automatically adds one more source you need to get rid of if you want that file completely taken down), and cheaper to run (as you don’t need to pay for a central host everyone must download from)