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Comment by fogzen | Hacker News Reader

Dat+Beaker is way ahead of IPFS in tooling, developer mindshare, consumer friendly UI, etc. With $250 million it's pretty shocking they don't seem more worried/focused on that.

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Interestingly I've heard of IPFS many many times and this is the first I've heard of Dat+Beaker. Do you have a starting point you suggest to get an idea of what it is or does?

Here are the official websites of the Dat Project and Beaker Browser:

https://datproject.org https://beakerbrowser.com

And a short video for Beaker: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2B9mwRFE8U

I might have visited those sites before, but thought it was some kind of new token bullshit.

Got a white paper link up at the top and some graphics of some decentralized nodes, so probably hit the back button faster than I delete spam from my inbox.

Dat and Beaker seems to be more focused on building products than us currently (I work on IPFS) so the more consumer friendly UIs does not surprise me. However, we're (Protocol Labs) are trying to build standardized protocols that can be shared across projects rather than just for us, hence it's currently more focused on lower-level technologies. With that said, we also have higher-level projects, most of them can be found over here: https://github.com/ipfs-shipyard/

(Disclaimer: I work on IPFS)

I've been playing with command line IPFS since the early days, but a menu bar IPFS app for my Mac? Now that's pretty damn sweet.

Kudos!

It's interesting to point out that in addition to Dat support, Beaker initially had support for IPFS as well, but dropped it.

Currently Dat's browser integration model requires the use of a specific browser (Beaker). Not that Beaker isn't awesome; I think Dat would garner more mindshare if it moved to browser-extension-based model like IPFS and didn't require a full installation of a new browser.

I think there is a plugin for firefox in development to enable the usage of dat:// urls. I recall seeing that in my mastodon feed.

How about adoption, e.g. Dat+Beaker vs IPFS+existing browser? Arguably, for these use cases, adoption matters more than all of the other items combined.

Can dat be accessed without that browser? I haven't found something like the IPFS node, and that's what made me not want to run dat.

Also, ZeroNet seems more advanced than both in terms of things that actually work today.

Hashbase exists, and in theory most Dat web apps could do a read-only version for legacy browsers, but since the tooling isn't there, you'd have to work out something by hand. The Dat ecosystem has pretty bad support for polyfills and bridging to the HTTP web right now. Many Dat demos I see today just fail hard over HTTP, maybe with a best-viewed-in message if the dev took some effort, but in principle it doesn't need to be that way.

Sure, here you go https://www.npmjs.com/package/dat

Neither of these services are going to work to solve our current dilemna until we can drop a .framework in and use it from a mobile app.. this is really the space that needs adoption strategies.

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