Today marks the end of an era for The Pirate Bay. The largest torrent site on the Internet has just removed all popular torrent files and made the switch to magnet links. The Pirate Bay team believes the move is needed to make the site future proof, and is confident that it won't cause much trouble among users. "Just click the red button instead of the green one and all will be fine," they say.

As announced a few weeks ago, The Pirate Bay has now largely stopped serving torrents.

Today, all torrent files being shared by more than 10 people have been replaced by so-called magnet links.

This means that instead of downloading the .torrent files directly from a central server, they will be downloaded from other BitTorrent users instead.

While a torrent-less Pirate Bay may sound like small disaster, in reality not much is going to change.

“It shouldn’t make much of a difference for the average user. At most it will take a few more seconds before a torrent shows the size and files,” The Pirate Bay team told TorrentFreak today.

“Just click the red button instead of the green one and all will be fine”

Torrents that are only shared by a handful of people (<10 ) will remain available for now, to ensure that the files remain accessible. For magnet links to work at least one person in the swarm should have the complete .torrent file and a BitTorrent client that supports magnet links.

“We put the 10 peer limit in just in case someone who created a torrent has an outdated client that doesn’t support magnets. By now all common torrent clients support magnets,” TorrentFreak was told.

The lack of support for magnets is one of the reasons why The Pirate Bay waited more than two years after first announcing that they wanted to remove all torrents. BitTorrent developers heard this call, and in the months that followed many improved or added support for magnet links.

In addition, Pirate Bay users should make sure that they have DHT and PEX enabled in their clients.

While the change doesn’t impact users much, external sites that rely on Pirate Bay torrents will have to implement a few changes. If they want to continue serving .torrent files the sites will have to fetch them from DHT. Also, hotlinks to .torrent files will stop working and will soon redirect to The Pirate Bay’s detail page for the files in question.

The Pirate Bay team told TorrentFreak that the transition to a magnet site is necessary, as it makes the site more resistant to being shut down. It takes only a fraction of the resources that were previously needed.

“The new site will be better protected from outside attacks. It uses less bandwidth, less servers, and can even run off a decent home connection,” The Pirate Bay team said.

“It’s the future.”