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Comment by Strom | Hacker News Reader

Peer-to-peer is such a wide term that can mean pretty much anything, e.g. micro loans of money to people in need. It can be viewed just as a way of doing things. So in that sense, all you need is a socket connection to get going.

What are you looking to build more specifically? News sharing? Video chat? File sharing?

If you're looking for file sharing, then a decent solution might be to use BitTorrent via the libtorrent library. https://www.libtorrent.org/

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> What are you looking to build more specifically?

I think this is my problem. I don't have an idea of anything I want to build specifically, I kinda just want to hack around on something.

My approach to learning new things is to usually read a bit, download it/import it and just start trying things. But that doesn't seem like a practical route when trying to build p2p applications?

Secure Scuttlebutt, DAT and Cabal are working p2p apps that can help expose you to the way things can work. Personally, I wrote frontends for two of those and it's helped me understand them better. These are all written in Nodejs, though.

There's a nice p2p and kappa database primer here: https://github.com/kappa-db/workshop

> I kinda just want to hack around on something.

If this is where you're at, and you don't mind too much learning a new language (js), or porting, the SSB community is very accessible from a social/personal perspective, and there's plenty of small, simple hackable ideas being tossed around discussions on the network for implementing.

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