Fun! I wish WebTorrent had caught on more. I've always thought it had a worthy place in the modern P2P conversation.
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 think the issue has generally been that web torrent doesn't work enough like the real thing to do its job properly. There are huge bit torrent based streaming media networks out there, illicit, sure, but its a proven technology. If browsers had real torrent clients we would be having a very different conversation imo
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.
I think we still have the same blocker as we had back when WebTorrent first appeared; browsers cannot be real torrent clients and open connections without some initial routing for the discovery, and they cannot open bi-directional unordered connections between two browsers.
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 and computers.
you can't stop someone from verbally describing certain objectionable material, therefore we should regulate the medium thru which sound travels and suck up all the oxygen on the planet. it's the only way to save the children
Cool. Some people complained about broken demos, I uploaded the mdwiki.info [1] website unaltered and seems to work fine [0]. MDwiki is a single .html file that fetches custom markdown via ajax relative to the html file and renders it via Javascript.
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.
I think it is very difficult (and dangerous to the host) to serve user-uploaded videos at scale, particularly from a moderation standpoint. The problem is even worse if everyone is anonymous. There is a reason YouTube has such a monopoly on personal video hosting. Maybe developments in AI moderation will make it more palatable in the future.
This is cool - I actually worked on something similar way back in the day: https://github.com/tom-james-watson/wtp-ext. It avoided the need to have any kind of intermediary website entirely.
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.
I think one of the values of (what appears to be) AI generated projects like this is that they can make me aware of the underlying technology that I might not have heard about - for example WebTorrent: https://webtorrent.io/faq
Pretty cool! Not sure what this offers over WebTorrent itself, but I was happy to learn about its existence.
i wish stuff like this was more like double-click, agree, and use. they always make it complicated to where you're spending time trying to understand if you should continue to spend more time on this.
I tried this, the functional "Functionality test page:" is stuck on "Loading peer web site... connecting to peers". I can't load any website from this.
I feel like if it were combined with federated caching servers it would actually work. Then you would have persistence and the p2p part helps take load off popular content. There are now P2P databases that seem to operate with this. Combining the best of both worlds.
IPFS [1] requires a gateway unfortunately (whether remote or running locally). If you can use content idents that are supported by web primitives, you get the distributed nature without IPFS scaffolding required. Content is versioned by hash, although I haven't looked to see if mutable torrents [2] [3] are used in this implementation. Searching via distributed hash tables for torrent metadata, cryptographically signed by the publisher, remains as a requirement imho.
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.
p2p storage as in torrent or IPFS or whatever is the part that we kinda' solved already. Serving/searching/addressing without the (centralized) DNS is still missing for a (urgently needed) p2p censorship resistant internet. Unfortunately this guy just uses some buzzwords to offer nothing new - why would I share links to that site instead of sharing torrent magnet links?
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.
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.
1. https://github.com/leoherzog/LinuxExchange
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