Peermaps – distributed, offline-friendly alternative to commercial map providers
peermaps.org
peermaps.org
The main initial benefit for the project is to have completely free embeddable web maps hosted p2p (using ipfs, hyperdrive, webtorrent) where you can entirely customize the rendering. Then later the benefits of the fully symmetric nature of the database will start to make more sense and the project has the potential to become less centralized on open street map servers and data. For some prior work that I and other people who work on peermaps have worked on check out https://mapeo.world/ and this very old writeup I made about an early version of the osm-p2p database. The experiences of working on that project and prior versions heavily informs how the current peermaps stack works.
You can check out a more up to date version of the progress on this talk we gave for speakeasyjs recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7X7C-door4
Or here is a slightly old slightly broken version of panning across a processed version switzerland using the end-to-end stack on my laptop (it looks better now) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHEmmQ6GnDI
If I use peermaps and zoom to a particular city, how does it find peers that have that particular part of the db?
OSM is basically a wiki where anyone can edit. I use it for about 20% of my mapping needs, especially when in a park.
There are plenty of great offline OSM clients, such as OsmAnd. I don't see any real value in the P2P here, particularly for mobile. However having more clients that render great maps is always a win.
Doesn't this kind of reduce the efficacy of it being P2P? If the goal is to reduce the load on OSM's servers, I suppose it makes sense, but from the standpoint of a free web, it doesn't seem to add much.
> Peermaps is a distributed, offline-friendly alternative to commercial map providers such as google maps. Instead of fetching data from a centralized tile service, your computer fetches map data from other peers across the network.
I think the wording is what confused me. It would be more descriptive to say "Instead of fetching data from a centralized tile service, your computer fetches OpenStreetMap data from other peers across the network". OSM is still centralized.
It's a free and open-source reboot of maps.me. Probably the best FOSS mobile front-end for OSM to date.
Personally, I prefer Magic Earth. I keep 7 surrounding US states downloaded on my phone and I get notification of updates (every few months).
Average file size per state is about 450MB stored on SD card. It is how maps should be done in my opinion.
The only difference here is how the distribution is handled. Not sure P2P is the way to go since most peers are likely to be mobile devices where data transfer can be disruptive and expensive.
(1) Where does the online map data come from? From Magic Earth servers or somewhere else?
(2) Where is the 3D data sourced from?
(3) Where is the satellite imagery sourced from? OSM definitely doesn't have this.
(4) Where are transit directions sourced from? AFAIK OSM also can't do this.
(5) Who is behind this app? The privacy policy just refers to them as 'Company'.
All in all, the functionality looks great but I'm quite skeptical about the lack of transparency.
The entire OSM working data set for NA is ~12GB. NY State is ~500MB. Most countries and states are under 100MB. Daily deltas are usually well under 1MB.
Tile servers are great for web apps, as you can pre-compute all the rendering and then cache the tiles. But there is no need to store terabytes of image data in an offline mobile app.
So I can see how hosting the data as a series of torrents would help make this more sustainable. But it's a bit silly to implement an entire torrent stack inside a web browser just to display a few static image tiles...
It is not all about scale. Much of P2P web development is idealistically about designing a more subjective internet.
So yes, seems so.