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Comment by superboum | Hacker News Reader

A better solution would be to integrate propositions like dweb[1] in browsers then simply use socket listening. Without socket listening, using WebRTC to create direct connections is also a solution. UPnP and ICE can help to configure routers and/or bypass their restrictions.

Using these technologies instead of OP centralized proposition would improve reliability, scalability, security and sustainability : currently hostyoself.com returns a 502 bad gateway.

[1]: https://github.com/mozilla/libdweb

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I find myself saying this a lot recently: Opera Unite, integrated a p2p web server for social messaging and file sharing. Wish it had taken hold, that looked like the stepping stone to federated social web to me.

For those wondering what "Opera Unite" means, some archived resources from 2009:

https://web.archive.org/web/20090618010520/http://unite.oper...

Introduction: https://web.archive.org/web/20090618160336/http://dev.opera....

Developer's primer: https://web.archive.org/web/20090618170044/http://dev.opera....

(Links taken from Czech wiki article, https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_Unite ) (I've never been fan of Opera but this project seemed great and so ahead of it's time. In retrospect I regret my antipathy prevented me to even try it.)

I used it and was all-in, sure that this was going to change the interwebs overnight, kinda like I went all-in on XHTML & semantics (eg microformats).

One of the facets was like Facebook's wall, they called it the "fridge door" IIRC, your friends could leave messages p2p and you could open directories really easily to share with anyone who had the right credentials (your "friends"). It really did pop out the middlemen -- share files direct from your computer by giving someone a link (like you would with Dropbox, but peer to peer); message people like on Facebook, but p2p ... some of that might be anticipation of developments rather than the actual product as set. It makes a lot of sense to me.

I ran into some folk who shared their torrent folder. These curated lists were something wonderful. You could even ask if something could be seeded. It elevated BitTorrent to new levels: You could make a torrent from anything, it made it available automatically and if someone showed an interest in it it was easy to switch on seeding. We had lots of fun watching old black and white movies.

From the Introduction-link above:

"In a nutshell, Opera Unite is a collaborative technology that uses a compact server inside the Opera desktop browser to share data and services. You can write applications — in the form of Opera Unite Services — that use this server to serve content to other Web users."

I think it's finally happening. It wasn't right time when it was introduced. We had to see bad side of centralisation to eventually go in direction of decentralisation which was what original Internet was meant to be.

Opera Unity (or was it called Unite?) really taught me to never ever use proprietary software, since it all can go poof overnight without any chance of getting it back. I really liked Opera Unity. I had my own little website and stuff.

There are always tradeoffs. DHT resolution may never be as fast centralized solutions. And as far as I know there's still no general solution to certain attacks like sybil. An intermediate solution that works with today's technology is for people to self-host "partially centralized" technologies, a la federation, but the UX is currently prohibitive. I don't want to manage 5+ instances for all the services I'm interested in and I also don't want to pay $5/mo to have someone else manage all of them, and still be stuck coordinating all those accounts. I'd love to see something like sandstorm.io as a service become popular for federated tech.

DHT perf, sybil resilience, and metadata exposure are weak points in p2p. There are ways to mitigate its necessity: SSB removes the DHT entirely and gossips data through a topology which users configure (on network or via manual setup). At this stage I think you want a hybrid so that you can reliably find data via the DHT, but then move away from the DHT when possible. Once you have reliable supernodes, its feasible that you'd check with them first over an existing connection prior to hitting the DHT.

I don't see how you can suitably solve the ops of federation because you require consumers to administer servers. The hope with P2P is that you can make ops relatively simpler; you remove servers, run the business logic client-side, and build against a distributed CDN. The supernodes will require administration, but, because they're dumb/unopinionated services, they are able to support a variety of applications.

I think the human cost aspects of federation could work like subreddits in terms of the amount of work necessary to keep things running relatively smoothly. The tooling likely needs to get way better though.

> Using these technologies instead of OP centralized proposition would improve reliability, scalability

i think i'll have to agree. getting 502 here.

it's now working

All we need is full socket API support for browsers. That would allow for a lot of possibilities.

ah yes, i can imagine the botnets

We can use the same logic (I mean ignorance) as with bloatware and other hipster bug hives: "Just buy a faster everything." (or even: "everyone has fast everything now")

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