Live data from Hacker News

Peerweb: Decentralized website hosting via WebTorrent

peerweb.lol

121–130 of 137 posts

Re: Peerweb: Decentralized website hosting via WebTorrent

#121

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.

What I'm suggesting is more in the context of self hosting - a JS wrapper which would make it easy to host a video with plain HTML while preventing bandwith issues.

Re: Peerweb: Decentralized website hosting via WebTorrent

#122
post #22

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.

There is PeerTube for video content.

I like Peertube a lot, and I didn't realize until just now that they had a form of P2P distributed distribution which uses WebRTC. But it would be great to be able to do that with a static site, without deploying a whole framework. Just a simple JS wrapper which could sit on top of a element would be amazing

Re: Peerweb: Decentralized website hosting via WebTorrent

#123
I built something similar a while back: Distribyted Gate: it turns any magnet link into a browsable webpage.

The key difference is the approach: it uses a Service Worker as an embedded HTTP server in the browser. This means files are loaded on-demand rather than requiring full downloads upfront. The SW intercepts fetch requests and streams chunks directly from the torrent swarm.

Live demos using some PeerWeb demo sites:

- Chess: https://gate.distribyted.com/?tid=1e14b1ba7fcd03e5f165d53ed8...

- Functionality test page: https://gate.distribyted.com/?tid=90c020bd252639622a14895a0f...

Code: https://github.com/distribyted/gate

Caveat: This is a proof of concept, so stability varies and it works best on Chromium-based browsers.

Re: Peerweb: Decentralized website hosting via WebTorrent

#125

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.

If it was, would it mean that qBittorrent would share with web clients by default? My understanding was that it's not the same protocol, so I'm guessing that a client like qBittorrent would have to choose to "bridge" between both protocols, right?

Re: Peerweb: Decentralized website hosting via WebTorrent

#126
Hi, Omodaka here thanks for checking out PeerWeb. I forgot to turn the client to serve the demos - should be better now ;)

This is meant to work with PeerWeb App which is more secure and stripped down torrent desktop client, that you can use to share your websites and host them through peerweb.lol. Still haven't released the dektop client but might do it.

Point of this is for everyone to host their content without needing servers, and as a great learning experience. Security is very big caviat here, so in no way is this final secure version.

Re: Peerweb: Decentralized website hosting via WebTorrent

#128
post #106
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm planning to eventually launch an open source platform with the same name (peerweb.com) that I hope will be vastly more usable, with a distributed anti-abuse protocol, automatic asset distribution prioritization for highly-requested files, streaming UGC APIs (e.g. start uploading a video and immediately get a working sharable link before upload completion), proper integration with site URLs (no ugly uuids etc. vis…

This sounds really interesting, do you have any more info or a repo to follow?

I'll post about the repo and more on my blog once I'm ready.

Re: Peerweb: Decentralized website hosting via WebTorrent

#129

I'm glad to see this was not unexpectedly fast to load. Would not want to upset those distributed expectations! I wonder if there's a business model in selling speed on a robust network that is on average too slow. Is there anyway to incentivize more nodes through micropayments distributed from people who pay for their site to be served faster? Ultimately I guess the distributed web is felled by economics thus far.

Runing dedicated, trusted tracker swarm would do.

Re: Peerweb: Decentralized website hosting via WebTorrent

#130

No Javascript https://github.com/Omodaka9375/peerweb https://github.com/Omodaka9375/peerweb/releases/expanded_ass... If the address is a hash perhaps it could contain a public key

In theory the hash could contain a public key. In practice it does not

Design decisions

Post reply on HN