I recently came across an article on TorrentFreak about the BitTorrent protocol and found myself wondering if it has remained relevant in today’s digital landscape. Given the rapid advancements in technology, I was curious to know if BitTorrent has been surpassed by a more efficient protocol, or if it continues to hold its ground (like I2P?).
Blockchain is a nice technology, but not all the solutions need blockchain technology. Just like BitTorrent doesn’t require blockchain, a decentralized internet alternative also doesn’t need blockchain.
That’s just for files though. Imagine a specific decentralised protocol for hosting websites.
You can technically host a website on IPFS but it’s a nightmare and makes updating the website basically impossible 2021 wikipedia IPFS Mirror. A specific protocol would make it far more accessible.
Websites are just files. For something like running a site on ipfs, you’d want to pack everything into a few files, or just one, and serve that. Then you just open that file in the browser, and boom, site.
I’m not really sure it qualifies as a web site any more at that point, but an ipfs site for sure. Ipfs has links, right?
With LibreWeb I tried to go this route, using IPFS protocol. But like I mention above, IPFS is not as decentralized by design as people might think. People still need to download the content first and hosting a node… And then ALSO pin the content… It’s not great. And look-up takes way too long as well with their DHT look-up.
Well… it’s not really designed for that use case, so yeah you’ll have to deal with issues like that. For interplanetary file transfers, that’s acceptable.
Problem with IPFS, is that it’s not really that decentralized as I wish it was. Since by default the data is not shared across the network, meaning if nobody is downloading and hosting that node, you are still the only one having a copy of the data. Meaning if your connection is gone or if you get censored, there is no other node where the IPFS data is living. It only works if somebody else is activily downloading the data.
Ow, and then you also need to Pin the content, or the data will be removed again -,-
Furthermore, the look-up via DHT is very slow and resolving the data is way too slow in order to make sense. People expect today max 1 or 2 seconds look-up time + page load would result in 4 or 5 seconds… Max… However with IPFS this could be 20, 30 seconds or even minutes…
These IPFS issues are basically UI-related. You wouldn’t expect a torrent to start within 2 seconds. You wouldn’t expect your torrent to be shared autonomously either. Technically, sharing IPFS hashes along with release names (similar to the crc32 on pre databases) would be very efficient, if only it was popular with a proper UI and indexing tooling. These hashes could even be signed by scene groups in the nfo.
There is actually a JS library called Planktos that can serve static websites over BitTorrent. I don’t know how good it is, but it sounds like a starting point.
That would be very cool, I know we have onion sites that operate on the Tor network that use keypairs for the domains, but the sites themselves are still centrally hosted by a person, anonymously hosted but still centrally hosted.
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I wish there was a decentralised way of hosting websites. Kind of like torrents.
There’s some cryptobro projects about sticking distributed file sharing on top of ~ THE BLOCKCHAIN ~.
I’m skeptical, but it might actually be a valid use of such a thing.
Blockchain is a nice technology, but not all the solutions need blockchain technology. Just like BitTorrent doesn’t require blockchain, a decentralized internet alternative also doesn’t need blockchain.
Sounds like maybe what you’re looking for is ipfs? https://ipfs.tech/
That’s just for files though. Imagine a specific decentralised protocol for hosting websites.
You can technically host a website on IPFS but it’s a nightmare and makes updating the website basically impossible 2021 wikipedia IPFS Mirror. A specific protocol would make it far more accessible.
Websites are just files. For something like running a site on ipfs, you’d want to pack everything into a few files, or just one, and serve that. Then you just open that file in the browser, and boom, site.
I’m not really sure it qualifies as a web site any more at that point, but an ipfs site for sure. Ipfs has links, right?
With LibreWeb I tried to go this route, using IPFS protocol. But like I mention above, IPFS is not as decentralized by design as people might think. People still need to download the content first and hosting a node… And then ALSO pin the content… It’s not great. And look-up takes way too long as well with their DHT look-up.
Well… it’s not really designed for that use case, so yeah you’ll have to deal with issues like that. For interplanetary file transfers, that’s acceptable.
I’m searching for better alternatives, ideas are welcome.
Probably the closest thing would be an activitypub blog or static site service.
ActivityPub is still using centralized DNS. I’m talking about a decentralized Web. And no, activitypub doesn’t scale as good.
Problem with IPFS, is that it’s not really that decentralized as I wish it was. Since by default the data is not shared across the network, meaning if nobody is downloading and hosting that node, you are still the only one having a copy of the data. Meaning if your connection is gone or if you get censored, there is no other node where the IPFS data is living. It only works if somebody else is activily downloading the data.
Ow, and then you also need to Pin the content, or the data will be removed again -,-
Furthermore, the look-up via DHT is very slow and resolving the data is way too slow in order to make sense. People expect today max 1 or 2 seconds look-up time + page load would result in 4 or 5 seconds… Max… However with IPFS this could be 20, 30 seconds or even minutes…
These IPFS issues are basically UI-related. You wouldn’t expect a torrent to start within 2 seconds. You wouldn’t expect your torrent to be shared autonomously either. Technically, sharing IPFS hashes along with release names (similar to the crc32 on pre databases) would be very efficient, if only it was popular with a proper UI and indexing tooling. These hashes could even be signed by scene groups in the nfo.
I’m personally trying to fix it… https://libreweb.org. Still a proof of concept though.
Looks really cool. Thanks for the share
Why MIT license and not something like GPLv3?
MIT license is more permissive.
Yeah but then companies can use your work and not provide compensation. But to each their own.
Yes that is true.
There is actually a JS library called Planktos that can serve static websites over BitTorrent. I don’t know how good it is, but it sounds like a starting point.
https://github.com/xuset/planktos
That would be very cool, I know we have onion sites that operate on the Tor network that use keypairs for the domains, but the sites themselves are still centrally hosted by a person, anonymously hosted but still centrally hosted.