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Peerweb: Decentralized website hosting via WebTorrent

peerweb.lol

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Re: Peerweb: Decentralized website hosting via WebTorrent

#114
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

Can't seem to find any mentions of this online from over a week ago, not much commentary either, mostly stuff that smells like advertising / astroturfing. Hmm...

Re: Peerweb: Decentralized website hosting via WebTorrent

#115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the time there was a bit of momentum behind the idea of mutable torrents: https://torrentfreak.com/mutable-torrents-proposal-makes-bit...

Did any mainstream client implement this?

Not that I know of, unfortunately.

Re: Peerweb: Decentralized website hosting via WebTorrent

#117
post #32
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…

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 lo…

been waiting for this for a while https://github.com/transmission/transmission/issues/47 https://github.com/arvidn/libtorrent/issues/7283

Re: Peerweb: Decentralized website hosting via WebTorrent

#118
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 signe…

You don't hear much these days about IPFS, but I can remember one big problem with it was illegal content and how to deal with it.

It's worse than just illegal content. Copyright doesn't allow you to redistribute anything without the permission of the copyright holder. IPFS however has no means to track the author or the license of content.

That means even distributing a piece of perfectly legal Open Source becomes illegal. Unlike a tarball or even a torrent where you can bundle content and license, IPFS allows addressing individual files or blocks, thus stripping the license from the content, which most licenses forbid. This does not even require an intentional action on the user, but happens automatically by partial content landing in your cache.

Re: Peerweb: Decentralized website hosting via WebTorrent

#119
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You're so right! I had never thought of that! We should remove all moderation everywhere, everything should be legal everywhere all the time! /s

[deleted]

Re: Peerweb: Decentralized website hosting via WebTorrent

#120

What a pity that although webtorrent support is already merged in the libtorrent master branch years ago, it's not merged into the stable branch yet, therefore not working out of the box in clients like qBittorrent.

this is the real reason it hasnt caught on
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