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Comment by mmcclure | Hacker News Reader

Dat (and Beaker Browser) is one of those things that I think about playing with every time I see it pop up somewhere. The technology truly feels like something special.

Then I sit down to actually start playing with it I struggle to think of anything to build that would actually take advantage of the tech aside from purely static sites. I would really love to see more complex examples folks have seen in the wild.

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A while ago I made a demo of a P2P chat application that runs on the beaker browser and uses the experimental P2P APIs. It's running at dat://feathers-chat.hashbase.io (slides from the talk at https://vanjs-decentralized.hashbase.io). If the peers can see each other you should be able to register with any email address and send chat messages between browser instances.

What I realized is that this technology ticks a lot of the boxes of what we right now think only the big cloud providers can do. By using a more decentralized protocol it is by design

- Actually Serverless

- Offline-first

- Real-time

- Auto-deploying

- Live-updating

- 100% uptime

I really think there is something there from both, a developer and user experience perspective. The problem is that a lot of it is still very experimental and far from the usability and maturity of e.g. a Firebase or Heroku.

This is a really cool idea, but how should I be using it? Trying to test it out just now I opened up two tabs in Beaker but both rooms just have the one user in them.

Love the design, by the way.

I believe this is happening because it is using the same peer connection. If you start to separate instances of the browser (e.g. in a VM or another machine) you should be able to see both users.

The design is taken from the Chat guide for https://feathersjs.com. Feathers is a JS library that allows to architect APIs in a way that they are protocol independent. Which worked great in this case because I just had to swap out the existing REST/websocket Feathers adapter for a DAT/Beaker API Feathers adapter.

dude I love how many people in Vancouver seem to be interested in or even working with dat :) thumbsup

;)

Can you explain how P2P chat is saved into dat?

How can someone without the keys add their messages to the feed? Wouldn't only the initial creator have the keys necessary to add to the feed?

> Then I sit down to actually start playing with it I struggle to think of anything to build that would actually take advantage of the tech aside from purely static sites.

Actually as someone that deals heavily with static sites, if dweb was only used for static sites and perhaps pushed us back to a more document-oriented web I and a lot of others would be quite happy with that. I don't think it needs to be capable of feature-complete replacement of Twitter and Facebook to be successful, and requiring it to be that way as a precondition for success is IMHO a losing strategy for dweb. Start with document-oriented and slowly increment.

There is the Dat installer for installing Android applications (https://github.com/staltz/dat-installer/).

Also a bunch of zines and music albums are shared over DAT.

There is hypercore (https://github.com/mafintosh/hypercore), a distributed append only log library.

Rotonde, a DAT based social network (https://github.com/Rotonde)

Secure Scuttlebutt now supports dat attachments...

Cabal (https://github.com/cabal-club/cabal-cli), a chat program.

Thanks for these! Cabal looks especially fascinating, I'm going to have to try and get some friends to join one and test it out.

Rotonde [0][1] is/was a pretty fascinating social network built over Dat/Beaker which basically involved each user helping to seed each user-feed they followed, resulting in a pretty stable/persistent ecosystem. I think it has mostly fallen by the wayside, but of course you should still be able to access a lot of instances due to hashbase.io seeding. To kickstart the platform we started a really basic "user list"[2] where you could find your friends' Rotonde URL based on their twitter username, since dat URLs are not exactly memorable.

[0] https://wiki.xxiivv.com/#rotonde

[1] https://github.com/Rotonde

[2] https://github.com/Rotonde/People

Every once in a while these xxiivv guys pop up and I find myself back in the hole of their website, wandering and exploring for hours, it's such an interesting personal wiki

Who are they? I want to know, but I felt like I would end up going down a lot of rabbit holes on their website to find useful information.

I worked on a Muxtape clone (making and sharing mixtapes in the browser) that I've been quite happy with: dat://duxtape.kickscondor.com

Code is here: https://github.com/kickscondor/duxtape.

Dat tape is a missed opportunity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Audio_Tape

True dat!

Duxtape is really nice, I enjoyed the writeup as well which was posted the other day. Thanks for writing cool things! :)

Taking the time to encourage someone is pretty sweet too. Glad you stepped out of the crowd to say hi - I'm enjoying looking through your HN comments.

I built a Connect Four clone you can play multiplayer over the Dat protocol.

- dat://connect-four.hashbase.io - https://github.com/rjsteinert/four-in-a-row-game

Yeah same here- it reminds me a lot of "the old days" of the internet where you just stumbled across cool things from sites with lists of links and no real decent search engine or e-commerce going on.

There is some interesting stuff people are playing with in Dat - e.g. their Twitter clone (1) has the actual posts distributed in what they are calling their WebDB. I.e. you as an individual publish posts at a dat:// address you control, and the central site just references that address when other users load the feed. Your posts are distributed across the other users so there is no SPOF.

There is the kernel of something really interesting there in this GDPR-world where people need to be more aware of who has their data, and what can be done to control that.

Interesting stuff.

1 - https://github.com/beakerbrowser/fritter/blob/master/README....

Does anyone know when the unwalled.garden extensions land in beaker?

This is something I struggle to understand as well. Can anyone explain what the steps would be to take say a server rendered MVC app or on the opposite end a JAMstack app and deploy it to Dat?

Beaker browser misses some simple stuff like dark themes which makes it look weird in my dark themed desktop manager. If anyone can point me to that, I will play more with it.

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