In 2020, I messed around with a PoC for what hosting and distributing Linux distros could look like using WebTorrent[1]. The protocol project as a whole has a lovely and brilliant design but has stayed mostly stagnant in recent years. There are only a couple of WebRTC-enabled torrent trackers that have remained active and stable.
I don't remember the web torrent issue numbers off the top of my head, but there are a number of long standing issues that seem blocked on webrtc limitations.
If we could say do peer discovery via Bluetooth, and open sockets directly from a browser page, we could in theory have local-first websites running in the browser, that does P2P connections straight between browsers.
> they cannot open bi-directional unordered connections between two browsers.
Last I checked, DataChannels were bidirectional
I’m not sure what the value prop is over just using a torrent client?
Maybe when they’re less buggy they’ll become a thing.
I put the project on hiatus years ago but I'm starting it back up soon! My project is not vibe coded and has thus far been manually architected with a deep consideration for both user and site owner expectations in the web ecosystem.
Pretty cool! Not sure what this offers over WebTorrent itself, but I was happy to learn about its existence.
[0]: https://peerweb.lol/?orc=b549f37bb4519d1abd2952483610b8078e6...
Ask any modern (post-GPT-2) LLM about a random color/name/city repeatedly a few dozen times, and you'll see it's not that random. You can influence this with a prompt, obviously, but if the prompt stays the same each time, the output is always very similar despite the existence of thousands of valid alternatives. Which is the case for any vibecoded thing that doesn't care about color palette, in particular.
This effect is largely responsible for slop (as in annoying stereotypes). It's fixable in principle, but there's pretty little research and I don't see big AI shops care enough.
Would it be the case for folks who don't have any idea what Lovable is.
Familiar UI is similar to what Tailwind or Bootstrap offers, do they do something different to keep it fresh?
Average internet users/consumers are likely used to the default Shopify checkout.
I think serving video is a particularly interesting use of Webtorrent. I think it would be good if you could add this as a front end to basically make sites DDOS proof. So you host like a regular site, but with a JS front end that hosts the site P2P the more traffic there is.
If advocating against CSAM = Fascism then I'll be the first to say that i'm a nazi facist. o7
I believe he had to eventually shut it down because people kept uploading horrifying stuff to it, and it was never even that popular. Child porn and bestiality were constantly being uploaded and I don't think he liked having to constantly report stuff to the FBI.
After building a proper comment section for my blog (including tripcodes!), I've thought about making my own "chan" site, since I think that could be fun, but I am completely terrified of people uploading horrible stuff that I would be forced to sift through and moderate pretty frequently. User submissions open up a huge legal can of worms and I am not sure that's a path that I'm willing to commit myself going down.
When there's strong anonymity, I suspect that this problem could be even worse.
It's a little depressing, because decentralized and distributed computing is one of the most interesting parts of computer science to me, but it feels like whenever I mention anything about it, people immediately assume piracy or illicit material.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20090313063155/http://www.e-imag...
The cool thing was it worked at the browser level using experimental libdweb support, though that has unfortunately since been abandoned. You could literally load URLs like wtp://tomjwatson.com/blog directly in your browser.
https://metaversejs.github.io/peercompute/
it's a gpgpu decentralized heterogeneous hpc p2p compute platform that runs in the browser
I like the idea though.
https://github.com/RickCarlino/hazelhop
It works, though probably needs some cleanup and security review before being used seriously (thus no running public instance).
Bittorrent, in my experience, "just works," whether you're relying on a torrent server or a magnet link to join a swarm and retrieve data. So, this is an interesting experiment in the IPFS, torrent, filecoin distributed content space.
User's can publish their DNS + pub key to the append-only blockchain, signed with their private key.
Use a torrent file to connect to an initial tracker to download the blockchain.
Once the blockchain is downloaded, every computer would have a full copy of the DNS database and could use that for discoverability.
I have no experience with blockchains or building trackers, so maybe this is a dumb idea.
From what i've seen you need some minimum percentage of makeithappen-ers amoung those interested in a project.
It seems the guy running the extension just left. With minimum influence on the value.
One issue I've had with IPFS is that there's nothing baked into the protocol to maintain peer health, which really limits the ability to keep the swarm connected and healthy.
Some new ideas are needed in this space.