Torrents that stay your business.
carl is a lightweight BitTorrent client with Nostr-based discovery and first-class Tor anonymity. The polish of a modern desktop app — built for people who actually care about privacy.
No accounts. No telemetry. Your identity is a local Nostr key you control.
Direct & fast
Connect straight to peers when privacy isn’t the priority. Trackers and DHT fully enabled.
Through a SOCKS5 tunnel
Route every connection over a proxy. DNS resolves remotely with socks5h:// — no leaks.
Anonymous by default
Download over Tor and seed as a .onion hidden service. Your IP never appears.
Find torrents on a network nobody can seize.
carl searches a decentralized relay network for torrent events (NIP-35) — no central indexer to censor, take down, or log your queries. Publish your own with a keystroke.
- Every event is Schnorr-signed — trust what you download.
- See exactly which relays each result came from.
- Add your own relays over wss:// — one per line.
Seed without ever revealing where you are.
Turn on Tor and carl seeds as a hidden service: peers reach you over a .onion address while your IP stays invisible. The moment a proxy or Tor is set, DHT and UDP trackers switch off — by design, not as an afterthought.
- A live leak-check confirms nothing is escaping the tunnel.
- Announce your onion over Nostr — no tracker required.
- Routing state is on every row — never buried in a menu.
Everything technical, surfaced — nothing buried.
Peers, pieces, magnet links, SOCKS proxies and onion addresses, treated as first-class, copyable elements.
Piece-level progress
A segmented progress bar per transfer and a full have/missing heatmap in the detail view.
Copyable everywhere
Info-hashes, magnet links and .onion addresses are one click from your clipboard.
Three discovery sources
Trackers, DHT and Nostr peer-announce, clearly distinguished — you always know where peers came from.
Live leak-check
A constant indicator of whether traffic is genuinely confined to your proxy or Tor circuit.
Onion seeding
Share a file as a hidden service in two clicks, with the generated address front and center.
Relay status at a glance
See every configured relay as a dot — connected, unreachable, clearnet or Tor.
Privacy you can see on every row.
Free software. No accounts, no telemetry, no compromises.