
How do dat:// sites interact with servers? (2018) - pcr910303
https://pfrazee.hashbase.io/blog/dat-and-servers
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jstanley
Since it's not linked in the article, this is about this:
[https://dat.foundation/](https://dat.foundation/)

And here's a walkthrough of building a simple chat application:
[https://docs.dat.foundation/docs/kappa](https://docs.dat.foundation/docs/kappa)

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skybrian
This experimental API seems rather weak? A dialog box speedbump is both
inconvenient and insecure.

It seems like peer-to-peer should imply that you can connect to mirrors
without trusting them? Any data you download gets verified. But I guess that
means you have to trust that there are no security bugs in your client, or
eventually you'll hit a server that exploits it.

In practice, I think picking one caching server might be more reliable. (Much
like setting GOCACHE when fetching Go modules, or configuring DNS with a list
of servers.) We should be aiming for making caching servers interchangeable,
but not necessarily connecting to random servers all the time.

This moves the problem one step back, since the caching servers will be
connecting all over the place (much like recursive DNS), but at least it's
running in the cloud with better connectivity.

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dang
Dat was discussed yesterday as well:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22909998](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22909998)

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nieve
I get the joke, but using a very common phrase and a well known url that's
already heavily overloaded seems like a poor choice. Searchability and clarity
are important for this kind of thing.

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Spivak
Honestly I think this should be something that regular websites be allowed to
do too. It seems odd that something like Postman can’t exist as an client-only
“offline” PWA.

