
Peermaps - bpierre
https://peermaps.org/
======
orblivion
What I see this helping is the proliferation of OpenStreetMap applications.
For instance, OsmAND and Maps.me (as I vaguely understand it? Please correct
me if I'm wrong) have their own data files served from their own servers,
copied from the source OpenStreetMap DB. Periodically, the app developers
update the data on their servers, and users soonafter get those updates. (I
like this system at least as an option; offline maps are convenient and at
least in theory more private.)

Where it gets interesting is if you fork the program. Perhaps OsmAND and
Maps.me aren't so fond of having their data used by forks of their
applications, for whatever reason. This creates a pretty major barrier for
people who want to make a fork; they now have to maintain a data server.
(Fortunately for F-Droid users like me, there is a fork of Maps.me simply
called Maps. It removes ads, so I imagine Maps.me isn't interested in
subsidizing it in the form of server access. I'm not sure what they worked out
as far as storage.)

It always occurred to me that they could mostly solve this problem with
bittorrent. But if the entire database is torrent-like with Peermaps, that's
even better. It could remove one of the barriers to experimenting with new
apps. Or so it seems to me.

~~~
rmc
Yes the OSM data format is good for editing, but includes everything, and
isn't sorted or anything like that. So data consumers process the data, keep
what they need, clean up data, process it and make into whatever format they
want/need.

You're right that the 'whole planet' is a lot of data to process, and this can
be a barrier. But there are regional extracts of OSM data available (e.g.
[http://download.geofabrik.de/](http://download.geofabrik.de/) ). So one can
always maintain just data for your region

~~~
orblivion
It sounds like you're saying that the reason these applications have their own
data files is that they tailor it for the application; nothing to do with
bandwidth issues.

In that case, I don't see how peermaps would make things any different for
them.

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wildduck
How is the does the peers discover each other? Via DHT? Or is it implementing
webtorrent?

~~~
lgierth
Most of it uses Dat and IPFS under the hood.

~~~
ilaksh
Dumb question.. why do people use dat instead of torrents?

Other dumb question. Are there dat builds for Android? The client is Node I
believe.

~~~
fwip
Torrents are static, dat archives can have updates pushed to them.

~~~
pabs3
There is a BEP for updatable torrents:

[https://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0046.html](https://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0046.html)

------
Sephr
Seems too focused. I would rather work on improving OpenStreetMap
extensibility.

Peerweb (still in development) will be able to add the same functionality to
OpenStreetMap with a more generalized and reusable implementation.

~~~
gniv
Can you say more? Which peerweb? Looking at the search results for "peerweb"
[1], none of them seems like a serious active project.

[1]
[https://www.google.com/search?q=peerweb](https://www.google.com/search?q=peerweb)

~~~
canadaduane
I think "the peer web" and "decentralized web" / "dweb" are emerging terms
that are trying to describe all of the efforts to make software work peer-to-
peer without centralized servers.

e.g.

1\. [https://www.inkandswitch.com/local-
first.html](https://www.inkandswitch.com/local-first.html)

2\. [http://thaliproject.org/](http://thaliproject.org/)

3\. [https://briarproject.org/](https://briarproject.org/)

4\. [https://beakerbrowser.com/](https://beakerbrowser.com/)

5\. [https://blockstack.org/](https://blockstack.org/)

~~~
rolandog
Would PeerTube and Mastodon be considered decentralized?:

6\. [https://joinpeertube.org](https://joinpeertube.org)

7\. [https://mastodon.social](https://mastodon.social)

------
chippy
How would this work with expiry of tiles or data? Would a swarm only carry the
"latest" stuff? Can you go back in time in theory?

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vcavallo
seems like a great idea. i’m not familiar enough with the domain to know how
unique this implementation is.. good luck!

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ilaksh
This type of thing seems very useful if you are ever going to get a viable
public alternative to Uber as an open network and platform that providers can
build off of.

I wonder if peermaps makes it convenient for peers to update maps? Because
OpenStreetMap is missing a lot of key information such as not having addresses
in many places.

But a peer to peer mapping technology with a more complete OSM plus a scalable
cryptocurrency such as Eth 2.0 and maybe a smart contract plus some
distributed coordination for bidding on rides could make things more
practical.

Right now arcade.city is doing something similar but is limited by some of the
factors I mentioned.

~~~
orblivion
What would you do differently about OSM contribution? Presumably peermaps
pulls from the main OSM database. Would a distributed system somehow make
contributions easier?

