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Comment by adkadskhj | Hacker News Reader

How's the race between IPFS and Dat Protocol these days? I keep waiting for one of them to pull ahead and solidify themselves.

Not that popularity matters exactly, but I used to be super hyped for IPFS but my fervor stalled when it *felt* like the team got super distracted by FileCoin and IPO. Combine that with technical hurdles like the time it takes to spread IPNS updates and i started to pull back.

These days i'm wondering if a less grandiose toolset like Hypercore might solve a lot of similar problems with better usability and short term traction.

Interesting nonetheless.

edit1: Been googling this question to answer it myself, and i now realize Dat _is_ Hypercore .. i think. Ah name churn. Lol.

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Yep, there's been some name-churn. Dat the name is no longer used, and all the tech that was powering it is now under https://hypercore-protocol.org/

From an architectural level, IPFS is more focused on the "one unified namespace for everything" application. IPFS is designed to transparently share blocks of files no matter what namespace/key that block lives under. For example, many projects have the MIT License in their source directory, so when retrieving that file, any node that has pinned a project containing that file can help seed you. This is handy from a sharing point of view, but also potentially difficult from a privacy issue.

The hypercore ecosystem is more focused on private / invite-only workspaces. Peers only exchange data with other peers in the same hyperswarm address.

Another difference in focus is mutability - Hypercores are designed to be updateable by exactly one person (an append-only log), and IPFS is designed to be updated by zero people (an immutable tree).

I haven't worked much with IPFS, but Hyper* makes it easy to mix and match only the modules you need for your application. There is some cool software and demos out there that use only hypercore and hyperswarm modules, and bypass the Hyperdrive file-tree representation entirely.

Not sure when you last paged into IPFS - the team has made some pretty awesome performance improvements in the past year and seen strong adoption to match (ex, nearly all NFTs are stored on IPFS today).

Definitely check out the IPFS 0.9 release from last week if you haven't seen it! Has some MASSIVE speed ups to IPNS propagation - we're talking less than a second resolution now! There's also a new experimental DHT client that can provide 30M records in about 2.5 hours (which the folks at nft.storage are using reliably at scale). -- https://github.com/ipfs/go-ipfs/releases/tag/v0.9.0

I’m still consistently impressed with the work Maf and Andrew are doing on Hypercore. The next major release will include multiwriter and has some nice networking-layer improvements, and I really like how they’ve implemented the updates. Don’t know the timeline for release but it’ll be this year.

Both are good tech, both are still in dev, so whichever floats your boat

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