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Peerweb: Decentralized website hosting via WebTorrent

peerweb.lol

11–20 of 137 posts

Re: Peerweb: Decentralized website hosting via WebTorrent

#11
This is pretty interesting!

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.

Re: Peerweb: Decentralized website hosting via WebTorrent

#12
post #6
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't my site, nor do I have any opinions on the implementation here. I do however find the idea of serving web pages via torrent interesting.

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?

This is a great point.

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.

Re: Peerweb: Decentralized website hosting via WebTorrent

#13
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.

1. https://github.com/leoherzog/LinuxExchange

Re: Peerweb: Decentralized website hosting via WebTorrent

#14
post #13

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…

http://bittorrented.com

Re: Peerweb: Decentralized website hosting via WebTorrent

#16
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.

Re: Peerweb: Decentralized website hosting via WebTorrent

#17
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.

Re: Peerweb: Decentralized website hosting via WebTorrent

#18

This is pretty interesting! 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.
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