Isn’t a “more correct” description of BitTorrent that each client is also a server? I’m not sure exactly how the protocol is written, but I assume each connection acts like a client-server one depending on the direction of data flow. With that in mind the fediverse is distributed social media. There’s nothing stopping you from spinning up an instance on say, your phone, making an account on it and federating with the other instances you like. Now your phone is both client and server, just like in BitTorrent. This setup would even match the functionality of only seeding when on. If you turn off your instance it would go offline and any non-federated data would not hit the web until you booted it back up, aka started seeding again. Defederating would act like removing a torrent from your list. Multiple users per server is where I think the analogy begins to break. Not sure what the BitTorrent equivalent would be.

Edit: Maybe SoulSeek is a better parallel??