Any plans to support Dat in the future too? I've had a bunch of distributed projects in mind recently, and I've still not decided which platform to start experimenting with properly, but Dat is definitely one of the other interesting ones alongside IPFS.
Yes, IPFS is purely hash based which is great for static images/movies.
DAT is also hash based, but at least it has support for top-level asymmetric keys that you can put files into, and ADD files to without the root directory changing its hash. IPNS works around this, but isn't ideal.
Neither systems can handle high frequency P2P data that changes - for instance Reddit-like sites etc. those ( http://notabug.io ) and other sites like the Internet Archive (which has IPFS, WebTorrent, and GUN versions decentralized) are built on our system (https://github.com/amark/gun), are already pushing terabytes of P2P traffic.
And don't forget about WebTorrent and Secure Scuttlebutt!!!
Not sure if this fully addresses your use-case, but I like the idea of serving a static bootloader from IPFS. The bootloader would contain all of a website's assets, and code for getting dynamic content from a backend. The backend could be:
- A central API where the bootloader can do arbitrary validation on the API responses.
Yes, that is already what the P2P Reddit does, but without IPFS (although this is a good idea!), and using GUN as the "backend" (fully P2P/decentralized though), SEA for validation/security (no need for a central one), and DAM for pubsub (no flooding problems like in libp2p) which can do WebRTC.
I'm sure people would love to see an IPFS version of a bootloader, instead of HTTP, that is a cool idea. Have a repo for it?
It's both similar and different in many ways :)
But I think adding support for it alongside IPFS wouldn't be too much of a pain, as superficially they work in somewhat similar ways. Primarily Dat is targeted towards sharing/storage of research data, which I think would be a cool thing to spread support for.
It has a browser that allows people to easily make and navigate sites, called Beaker. It has some really interesting projects built around it, and as marknadal says, it supports changing the contents of locations etc.
I believe Dat works over Tor currently, which is interesting. However finding info on successes/problems with the various P2P stacks and Tor is a bit hit-and-miss.
