Hello everyone,
I recently came across an article on TorrentFreak about the BitTorrent protocol and found myself wondering if it has remained relevant in today’s digital landscape. Given the rapid advancements in technology, I was curious to know if BitTorrent has been surpassed by a more efficient protocol, or if it continues to hold its ground (like I2P?).
Thank you for your insights!
I wish there was a decentralised way of hosting websites. Kind of like torrents.
Sounds like maybe what you’re looking for is ipfs? https://ipfs.tech/
Problem with IPFS, is that it’s not really that decentralized as I wish it was. Since by default the data is not shared across the network, meaning if nobody is downloading and hosting that node, you are still the only one having a copy of the data. Meaning if your connection is gone or if you get censored, there is no other node where the IPFS data is living. It only works if somebody else is activily downloading the data.
Ow, and then you also need to Pin the content, or the data will be removed again -,-
Furthermore, the look-up via DHT is very slow and resolving the data is way too slow in order to make sense. People expect today max 1 or 2 seconds look-up time + page load would result in 4 or 5 seconds… Max… However with IPFS this could be 20, 30 seconds or even minutes…
That’s just for files though. Imagine a specific decentralised protocol for hosting websites.
You can technically host a website on IPFS but it’s a nightmare and makes updating the website basically impossible 2021 wikipedia IPFS Mirror. A specific protocol would make it far more accessible.
Websites are just files. For something like running a site on ipfs, you’d want to pack everything into a few files, or just one, and serve that. Then you just open that file in the browser, and boom, site.
I’m not really sure it qualifies as a web site any more at that point, but an ipfs site for sure. Ipfs has links, right?
I’m personally trying to fix it… https://libreweb.org. Still a proof of concept though.
There is actually a JS library called Planktos that can serve static websites over BitTorrent. I don’t know how good it is, but it sounds like a starting point.
There’s some cryptobro projects about sticking distributed file sharing on top of ~ THE BLOCKCHAIN ~.
I’m skeptical, but it might actually be a valid use of such a thing.
