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Show HN: Decentralized, Mutable, Serverless Torrent Swarm Websites (github.com/publiusfederalist)
433 points by publiush on Dec 10, 2021 | hide | past | favorite | 186 comments



This is a project I've been working on to create decentralized, peer to peer, "serverless" websites using several technologies including webtorrent, dmt (mutable torrent BEP-46), and handshake decentralized domains.

You can create either an immutable (uneditable) torrent site, or you can create a ed25519 keypair and create a mutable (updatable) torrent site.

This is great for blogging, whistle blowing, and other things. It also scales well since torrent technology is great although it had previous been pigeonholed to other use cases.

Please give it a try and let me know your thoughts! I don't take any credit for this since I just weaved the great technologies others already made together!


This is a fantastic work!

The best part of Federalist is reading and displaying the websites from BitTorrent using BEP-46. The Handshake part is less impressive for me personally, since it basically reads Handshake values from a service (query.hdns.io/dns-query).

If Federalist adds a Handshake daemon, it will be much more decentralized, but at the same time much heavier on resources.

For historical perspective, decentralized websites (or p2p websites) are here since like 20 years. Here's a super concise list of what I recall off the top of my head.

- Freenet is the first project I'm aware of doing that

- ENS+IPFS websites is a strong movement now (see esteroids.eth.limo, I'm a co-creator of this)

- ZeroNet was going strong like 5 years ago, and even though it's less popular now it's still functional and a nice project.

- Agregor browser brings decentralized website the Hypercore (a successor of DAT protocol)

- BitTorrent was supposed to have a project especially for decentralized websites (Maelstrom web browser), but it didn't took off eventually

- Magnetico is a search engine built on top of BitTorrent, very similar to Federalists, but without the Handshake part.

- Skynet is a project meant almost only for decentralized websites, based on Sia. They have integration with ENS, and afaik, also with Handshake (check it out!)

- Swarm, Namecoin etc. could also be used for decentralized websites. I saw some people doing demos with it, but can't recall any links/names atm.


> I don't take any credit for this since I just weaved the great technologies others already made together!

You should absolutely take credit for your part in this. Others may have created the technologies you used, but you tied them together into something "more" than the individual pieces. There's room enough for all players to take their credit for their part in this existing.


This looks like a great project, thank you.

One aspect of censorship resistance is the ability for people to publish and read content anonymously (or pseudonymously). Could you add something to the README about that threat model?

Also, I see that your IRC channel is hosted on Freenode. That seems an odd choice for a project that is opposed to censorship. Please consider a network with a better track record in that regard.


Thank you!

It doesn't actually allow you to publish and read anonymously without Tor or a VPN, but I will definitely recommend using both of those on the README. I do want to be careful about what is and isn't claimed, as I believe the world has become a bit dissatisfied with overclaims from decentralization projects lately.

I don't think I've come to the same conclusion about freenode (https://news.itsfoss.com/freenode-controversy/), and IRC is only decentralized if there isn't just one network anyway. I also don't think this is the right forum for this anyhow! You're definitely free to setup the same channel (#scarywater) on another network, and I'd be happy to be present there as well!


> I don't think I've come to the same conclusion about freenode (https://news.itsfoss.com/freenode-controversy/)

This article really obscures some facts. For example, it implies that Lee was the person providing for freenode, when in fact he was just one of many donors: most servers in the network were donated by non-profits. Likewise, the article says Freenode operators were not staff because they were not paid: they still donated their time and resources to keeping the network alive. Also, it says Freenode was "taken over" by Christel, which to my knowledge is not exactly correct: from my understanding, she was indeed granted responsibilities, but was not supposed to govern (as in, give orders) to the network.

Also, most of the drama took place after this article was published. Many chans which remained on Freenode were pushed out by the new management who seemingly ran regexes on all incoming messages, automatically taking over or banning any chan which had mentions of libera.chat. That is, until new management actually dropped the entire database (a huge "fuck you" to the faithful who remained) and started again from scratch.

All in all, Freenode's story is one of a collective project run by volunteers on their donated time/hardware turned into a top-down startup. It also seems the freenode.net homepage has been turned into some kind of newsboard without a lot of people but where lots of content appears to be "deleted". Strange new world: https://freenode.net/n/freenode/57/there-are-literally-78-us...

> IRC is only decentralized if there isn't just one network anyway.

Not exactly, as there is server-to-server federation to distribute the load (but it's not exactly decentralized in this case). But yes, decentralizing is better. But there's plenty of IRC servers where to host your chans: OFTC, tilde.chat, indymedia, hackint...


Hi, so I’m Andrew Lee and can definitely comment on this as I’m directly involved:

> For example, it implies that Lee was the person providing for freenode, when in fact he was just one of many donors: most servers in the network were donated by non-profits

You’re right, there were other server donors who provided servers on the network. However, the donations I provided were on a different order of magnitude financially. I provided many servers, of course, but also 7 figure funding [1]. That said, I’m definitely thankful for the server providers who were providing servers to us and continue to.

> Also, it says Freenode was "taken over" by Christel

All documentation both publicly and internally would refute this - Christel was fully in charge and the former staff was aware since it was explicitly written in the onboarding documents and on the website. Also, Tomaw was fully aware of this as well as of my ownership of freenode.

> Also, most of the drama took place after this article was published.

Again, untrue. Tomaw and I were in discussion and he was holding the network hostage for over a month prior to the article. prawnsalad of KiwiIRC and Snoonet was mediating and had had enough of Tomaw [2].

> All in all, Freenode's story is one of a collective project run by volunteers on their donated time/hardware turned into a top-down startup.

I think there is a misconception of the difficulty in running an IRC network. Given I have been a staff member off and on of other networks and continue to be on several, including on the coding teams, I can assure you that nobody would say this is a difficult time consuming thing. It’s not like open source code contribution.

Secondly, several members received monetary benefits - from me - in the form of flights, hotels, etc. like at DEFCON for example. The same people have looked me in the eye and said thank you before turning around and making up stories in a brazen attempt to slander me to take freenode. Not very upstanding people.

I think it’s pretty clear what they cared about when you review Libera months later and see that it’s a closed group run by the former freenode staffers, and they are now the oligarchs of Libera.

Finally, stop trying to force or pressure people to leave freenode. You’re acting like the Libera staff who actually spent months writing open source projects with the same falsehoods asking them to leave. It’s a form of censorship but worse it’s bullying.

As for me and freenode, we have been in legal discussion to truly decentralize the network and give it to the people - and that is what is happening. I have always been the custodian and financial supporter supporting freenode, even when the former staff was facing legal action from users who they had harassed, so this isn’t outside of my resume and track record - I obviously care about it deeply.

Freenode will belong to the people where it belongs, not the former staffers hands.

[1] http://techrights.org/2021/05/22/freenode-misinformation-or-...

[2] https://gist.github.com/prawnsalad/4ca20da6c2295ddb06c164679...


> I provided many servers, of course, but also 7 figure funding

In my book, that's irrelevant. If i choose to donate personal resources to a project, it does not entitle me to any power over said project.

> fully in charge (...) my ownership

As someone who's external to both Freenode and Libera project, my understanding was that both aimed to be somewhat-horizontal projects and that such fine print was irrelevant. Much like Debian project has a DPL for some specific situations but actual decisions are taken by the base (which has pros and cons).

> Tomaw and I were in discussion...

I'm not saying there was no drama prior to the discussion. I'm saying many people who had a neutral stance on the matter were pushed to exile by your new team's aggressive actions, which you don't seem to refute.

> Finally, stop trying to force or pressure people to leave freenode.

I'm not. I'm always happy to side with an established non-profit versus an unclear business plan driven by an entrepreneur, but in this specific case i have zero balls in the game. You'll find me much more active in XMPP spaces where such concerns are non-existent because user hosting is decoupled from chatroom hosting (via s2s protocol).

> As for me and freenode, we have been in legal discussion to truly decentralize the network and give it to the people

Cool. Despite my profound disagreements on general politics, i wish you the best on this path. I've read more than a few cringy arguments for Freenode in the past months, but i believe all of us can take a turn for the better at any time. Can't wait for the non-profit to be officially registered!


I don't know about turning for the better -- since the very first response message in the entire ordeal was where I told tomaw freenode needs to be decentralized [1] -- but, yes, that's where we are headed!

That said, forget about me in this ordeal. freenode is going to the people where I always felt it belonged, and we're all in it together. :-)

[1] https://old.freenode.net/static/files/on-freenode.pdf


Be careful about the integration with Tor, they explicitly discourage the use of torrents (since they're so heavy they make the whole network slower)


> censorship resistance

Can someone tell me what is going to happen if let's say a terror group decides to use this for propaganda purposes, along the lines of religious fundamentalism/executions as we've witnessed before? Who is going to take the blame for providing them with what is advertised as an unblockable platform?

Has abuse even been factored in?


This is an important debate that comes up all too often. I do think this is the proper forum for this, so I'm glad you brought this up and I would be happy to share my thoughts.

The more information people have had in the history of humanity, the more freedoms and liberties we have also had. We would likely still be living in monarchies if not for the spread of information -- North Korea is a prime example.

If information is good and people agree with it, they will consume it and the swarm will be well seeded and public consensus will have spoken. If information is bad and people disagree with it, they won't consume it and the swarm will be sparse at best, at which point, it will be easy for ISPs and others to block access to these swarms.

Torrents have been around for a long time, but terrorists haven't really utilized them much. On the other hand, anime really has to give its thanks to Bram haha.

Just because there are gun abusers, you wouldn't want to take away the 2nd amendment which keeps the government in check. The same goes for information or discourse and the 1st amendment. The day we censor ourselves is the day we throw away liberty.


Personally, I think the right state answer isn't censorship, it's infiltration. Find and bust the people creating the illegal content. That's what the Feds have done with unsavory hidden services.


This is sort of the right answer, but it assumes someone is willing to devote as much time to each individual terrorist as the terrorist themselves is willing to spend creating networks and preparing violence, or that there's a well-enough agreed upon set of ideas that a given society can make a mass effort to infiltrate those networks. Usually that happens via government or very rarely journalism; there aren't any great examples of vigilante anti-terror or anti-mafia or anti-pedo infiltration networks I'm aware of. Again, because crime (or you could say, 'evil') is an asymmetrical affair, and it takes full time 100 LEOs to find one kid before he blows up his school. It's not really possible for private vigilante networks to compete with that, even if average people did have as much free time as full-time psychopaths.


Censorship would be shutting things down after the fact.

I think the important question now is whether it's irresponsible to build channels that (A) terrorists will find useful, (B) will allow them to look more savvy and attractive than they actually are, (C) seed their ideas to a wider audience than they have - see [1] - and (D) count on less motivated people with nonviolent ideas and less time on their hands to offer countervailing ideologies and "win" the space. The space you're creating and enabling.

[1] People with more time on their hands and/or a more absolute/violent agenda are more apt to find ways to game a system, whether it's a swarm or a newsfeed. Their time and motivation are asymmetrical to the normal functioning of a marketplace of ideas in which good/logical ideas are supposed to outperform bad/emotional appeals. The true question is not whether this platform can or will be gamed, or trying to guess and preempt how it will be gamed, but deciding whether it's immoral to exert your intellect to give leverage to griefers by giving them more visible surface area. If the result is something that only marginally helps average people but drastically improves the lot of griefers, then the surface area you're providing them to attack everyone else will be exponentially larger than the defensible area of reasonable ideologies you hope to have counter the bad ones.

In other words, all the talk of open ideas is true in a truly open marketplace, but violence tends to fill a vacuum, and in a closed system or especially a new, empty space with experimental tooling, it is entirely possible for bad actors to drive out good ones.


Just to add to this. Back in 2012 I started coding something that I considered a necessary libertarian corrective to the centralized social networking world. I'm not going to post the idea here because I still consider it too explosive. Thankfully no one has done it yet. There came a point deep into the development when I realized that all my arguments to the contrary - arguments which sounded exactly like yours - were wrong. The system I was building to free humanity from centralized, moderated, let's say channeled forms of controversy, would be exploited by the worst, not the best. The fascists and the trolls would absolutely dominate the space, and if they did, the stakes would be life and death. And it would be me who had built that space that they were now using; a space they couldn't have conceived of themselves. This was why I shut the project down. Looking back, I was right. What's happened with FB and Twitter and January 6th was a pale shadow of what my concept might have opened up, in those years, when anyone was looking for any new platform. The sickening thing is that while we're in the business of opening up communication and tell ourselves we're creating liberty, we do have to weigh the question of whether average Joes are ready for it and be honest with ourselves - a lot of times they're not.


I don't think that Facebook and Twitter are a bad thing at all. I think there is confusion as there is a massive power struggle and a lack of information on our side (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWLjYJ4BzvI).

Also, I don't know what you mean by "average Joes." I don't think any person is less competent than another, and I would rather help to give access to information to the people, frankly, if I thought someone did have less information.

I'm a little confused by your position on people, and afraid of your position on freedom of information and equality.


If you don't think some people are less competent than others, you've never had a serious job. I would just say that competent people need to take responsibility and be held accountable if they create systems that whip up mobs of people less capable of independent thought - which said mobs wouldn't be able to devise on their own. I don't think this point of view is scarier than one in which the loudest mob rules and technicians exist to serve their whims.


> a space they couldn't have conceived of themselves.

It is hubris to think that only you could've conceived this idea. Eventually someone else would.

If you released, and controlled it, at least you have a way to control the spread of misinformation on it.


So far I'm the only one that has conceived of it, but even if it was conceived of by the leaders of the KKK, they wouldn't have as good a chance of building it successfully and making it work to their benefit as if a self-interested techie liberal libertarian did all the hard stuff for them. Pretty much none of the people dumb enough to spend their lives spreading online hate would be capable of building the platforms they use to spread their garbage. Show me a nazi who's using a computer and a network and a website they invented themselves, or could ever invent in a million years if left to their own self-destructive devices. It's not hubris to realize that they lack the intellect and means but are perfectly willing to game the results. Also, to wit, "if you controlled it" is hubris when you're talking about any large online platform, but it makes no sense at all if you're talking about something decentralized.


well put. The things you forgot: 1) trolling is also a type of moderation. It will unmake whatever serious effort if 1-2 persons disagree hard enough. 2) sure, there will be facists but those technically seek is the opposite of the platform. 3) however weird or undesirabe some ideologie is we can give it time to come to its senses before we go full retard enforcing our own. if we cant the other idea deserves to win. its how humanity always did its thing. give us enough time and we the people burn everything to the ground and start fresh. its like a fee we must pay. millions have to die for the eventual idiot ruling class to be at least some what replaced by people with interests beyond their own.

if the facists won the war our ideas would be the ones that desperately need to be silenced by them.

just have the battle royal of weird ideas out in the open. if the muskian forced brain chipians win we do that for a while. it only seems more stupid than say mandatory/forced experimental medication for everyone, putting people in cages for smoking weed, starvation salaries, selling cars that go faster than the speed limit. etc etc

maybe everything i wrote here is the best example of a stupid idea? should we investigate or just press delete?


I mean, on the scale of weirdness is it weird that we sell guns you can't shoot at people, and cars that go faster than the speed limit, while locking people up for inhaling burning weeds? Uh, yeah. The thing is, we did arrive at this set of compromises by something slightly more logical, flexible, and iterable than one group of fanbois just forcibly outnumbering another group of idiots. What millions did die for, in the west, was not a cult leader or a weird set of ideas, but a legal framework. Which, creaky as it is, privileges the right of individuals to be treated as individuals and be innocent until proven guilty. Not perfectly at all. But more individual rights than have ever existed in history, and more than could ever exist under the rule of one depraved ideology or another. What we have, at the moment, is a system that appears to make no sense precisely because it has measures in place to prefer individual rights over ideology. To the extent we have any freedom or happiness at all, it's in contradiction to the ideologies being pushed by people who want to have their turn to rule and rewrite the social contract. A cursory glance at the history of ideological movements shows that western democracy is a total aberration in its ability to hold murderous ideologues slightly at bay.

So. A battle royale of weird ideas is great, but only if it's in a ring where everyone leaves their guns outside, and no one's life hangs in the balance. Otherwise it's a bunch of trolls playing dress up with someone else's clothes, burning someone else's stuff, killing someone else's kids; see Stalinism and Nazism. The current generation is lost for knowledge of history, so they don't understand the fire they're playing with every time they think imposing their correct point of view by force is the only way. It's not their fault; their parents were mostly idiots. But they only exist because some people held the fort for an arena where you could debate without existential peril to yourself or the opposite party. The framework is all. The ideas can come and go within it, and lots of seemingly stupid contradictions or compromises will arise, as you pointed out. But if any side is able to overturn the framework, then there will not be a fair battle of ideas ever again.


Also, it's entirely possible that a lot of other people besides me have conceived of the idea - I'm sure I'm probably not the only one - and maybe all of them discarded it because they realized what it would lead to. I will say that if I ever see it in practice, I'll make it my life's mission to attack it and strangle it in its crib.


This sounds ridiculous.

How could it be "worse" than Freenet or tor, where everything is completely anonymous?


Fascists aren't exactly known for thinking outside of the box, but rather for throwing their very large resources [0] at established methods (eg. militias and propaganda).

Three examples from the tech world of the last two decades:

- indymedia.org has arguably been a serious inspiration for the fachosphere (although they dropped the bottom-up part) in gathering information from many places/topics

- raddle.me newsboard was developed by anarchists but the codebase ended up used by fascists

- Trump's TruthSocial is just a rebranded Mastodon, although they tried to conceal that fact in the initial stages

[0] Fascists of all stripes are famously very well-funded and supported by the industry. This is the case today (Trump, Bolsonaro, Zemmour, Le Pen..) and was the case historically, as portrayed in the "Fascism Inc" documentary: https://youtube.com/watch?v=-L5Xlgc8S2Q


> Just because there are gun abusers, you wouldn't want to take away the 2nd amendment which keeps the government in check

I don't think this is a good comparison. The second ammendment was appended in 1791 if I'm not mistaken, i. e. shortly after the war for independence on american soil against an empire, which was fought with militias (hence the third ammendement). That's a totally different scenario than the 21st century.

It should be monitored who acquires an assault rifle. Or you end up with the highest rate of school amok per capita globally[1], because gun owners are either mentally unstable themselves or not capable of preventing a mentally unstable person from getting hold of the rifle due to a lack or knowledge. Licenses make just as much sense as they do for cars.

Which brings me to the division of powers. The constitution balances executive, legislature and judiciary in its three articles. It is very difficult for either of these organs to abuse power without being met with a restriction. This has been the concept since the very beginning, as you surely know judging by the gh handle, and you bet the federalist paper authors favored an institutional solution over arming each citizen.

In other words, the second ammendement is just as little of an ultimate for checks and balances as the web 3 is for whistleblowing. We already have securedrop and globalleaks. Going a step further is possible, but not strictly necessary, and should not be treated as such in my opinion.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1155011/number-school-sh...


Why are school shootings the bar here? Do we care about murdered children, or very specifically only murdered children in school by a gun? Certainly the US has tons of room for improvement, but it seems very disingenuous to cherry-pick a subset of what people actually care about just to oversell your point.


It's an example, and a compelling one. That is not the same as cherry picking.


School shooting statistics are a deeply uncompelling example.

Tragedies are often non statistically relevant


Luckily in this case they are.


When we have a government without corruption, we probably won't need to be armed. That isn't the case today. Checks and balances work in a young government, but after hundreds of years, friendships, camaraderies, it's not difficult to have loosely coupled groups infiltrating all branches. Things eventually crumble as perfect systems are hard.

This is akin to the monarchies, where a king may have risen to power as a good leader, but a later king may not have been so kind.

These things aren't perfect, but having multiple systems to pick up where other systems fail provides us the ultimate leverage in the end.

Would you take airbags out of cars because they sometimes fail and always harm those who feel their impact and chemicals and everyone is "supposed to wear seat belts by law" anyway?


> When we have a government without corruption, we probably won't need to be armed. That isn't the case today. Checks and balances work in a young government,

I’d argue the opposite: it’s the threat of armed resistance that only works with a young government.

The idea that an armed group could overthrow the government in the US today has always struck me as fanciful. The army would shut down such an attempt very, very easily.


You forget the ties between the army and the 2nd amendment people, don't you?

I'm no American but I can't really see most soldiers starting to shoot their own?


In that case surely the second amendment isn’t necessary, then. You’ve already got the army!


Look to Turkey for a failure of that model.

Although I should say that I am always convinced by those who say that that particular coup was staged by Erdogan as a pretext.


> It is very difficult for either of these organs to abuse power without being met with a restriction.

I think, as we have seen over the past ~40 years, it is very easy for either of them to abuse power. On the other hand, it is very difficult for voters to implement legislation that improves the lives of everyday people in any meaningful way. That is really what the Constitution did. It created a complex system of government with veto points around every corner to, in the words of James Madison, "protect the minority of the opulent (wealthy property owners) against the majority (the plebs)". And this is certainly how it is currently functioning. I stopped romanticizing the constitution years ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federalist_No._10#Background


> The second ammendment was appended in 1791 if I'm not mistaken,

When the first amendment was written, they only had primitive printing presses. Obviously it does not apply to the internet, electronic printers, etc.


This is quickly devolving into a Facebook "conversation". I'm disappointed.

In any case, there is a very good argument for the first amendment changing in response to today's challenges, culture, and technology.


Assault rifles were banned in 1986. The only assault rifles available on the civilian market are registered pre-ban ones. Due to limited supply they tend to be quite expensive ($10,000+). You have to register with the ATF and pay a special tax to purchase one.


Huh? Pretty sure you can still buy an AR-15 in a lot of states, am I missing something?


An AR-15 style rifle is not an assault rifle. The definition of an assault rifle is "a selective fire rifle that uses an intermediate cartridge and a detachable magazine". Selective fire means "the capability of a weapon to be adjusted to fire in semi-automatic, burst mode, and/or fully automatic firing mode". These were banned by the 1986 Firearm Owners Protection Act.

There are "assault weapon" bans like that in my home state of California that ban certain cosmetic features on guns. These are completely pointless as an AR-15 is functionally no different from any other semi-automatic firearm.

Examples:

Assault Rifle

https://i.imgur.com/pGnxHRD.jpg

"Assault Weapon"

https://i.imgur.com/xhsZ2dK.jpg

Not an "Assault Weapon"

https://i.imgur.com/VKtpdSy.jpg


This is the kind of autistic pedantry I come to HN for. I don't know what I was thinking.


thank you


What makes an Armalite Rifle-15 significant to you?

I ask because it isn't actually all that interesting as far as guns go.

It shoots a fairly low-power cartridge, roughly equivalent to 30-30, which means that it isn't powerful enough for deer hunting in some states. That's part of why it's easy to shoot even for XX folks. (Another part is the ergonomics; the stock and hand-grip make it easier to shoot correctly from the shoulder than most rifles.)

It's semi-auto, but so are most guns these days. It doesn't shoot any faster than other semi-autos. Standard capacity magazines aren't any larger.

It is possibly the most popular rifle of all time, certainly in the last 50+ years.


> Or you end up with the highest rate of school amok per capita globally

The US has a high rate of firearms fatalities. Around two thirds of these are suicides. Around zero thirds of them are school shootings.

School shootings are sufficiently rare that when they happen, they make national news. Which is catastrophic, because studies have shown that media coverage of school shootings induces school shootings. It's attention-seeking behavior by the criminally insane, so if you show them that it generates attention, it increases their attraction to the act. Most US media outlets know this and do it anyway, because it generates a lot of hits. This is the primary reason why the US has relatively more than other countries, including other countries with a high rate of firearms ownership.

> Licenses make just as much sense as they do for cars.

It doesn't work for this. If you have a driver's license and know it will be taken away if you drive drunk, that's an effective deterrent. School shooters tend to be young people with no prior criminal history. They would pass a background check. Having a license to take away after the fact is meaningless when after they fact they're going to prison forever.

In theory where this does something is for criminal gangs, where you say you want to deny people with a criminal history a firearm. Criminal gangs actually are a significant fraction of firearms fatalities. But here's how that works out: People with a criminal history who go back to a life of crime just get a gun through their criminal organization the same way they get the illegal drugs they're dealing.

Meanwhile, people with a criminal history who reform themselves will commonly also carry a gun, for self-defense against criminals from their past life. Laws against this don't deter it when the alternative is getting murdered. Then this otherwise reformed criminal gets caught in possession of a firearm yet not committing any other crime, so they go back to prison and get another chance to get caught up with criminals. A large number of black people are currently in prison for no other crime than "felon in possession of a firearm," and were in possession of it for no other reason than self-defense. Or weren't in possession of it at all but were near enough to one owned by someone else for a bad cop to opportunistically file the charge.

Banning possession of a technology is weak. If you wrongfully shoot someone, you should go to prison. If you have a gun and don't harm anyone with it, no one should have a problem with that.


Between 2009 to 2018 there were 288 school shooting incidents in the US. During this time there were a total of 5 similar incidents in the rest of the world. Something is definitely wrong.


> Something is definitely wrong.

Oh absolutely. More than one thing.

The US is structurally messed up in a dozen different ways and it puts people in a corner. People are angry and have no idea what to do about it. Undirected rage because people don't know where to direct it.

Then the media directs it to shooting up schools by plastering that all over the screen. It could just as easily be pipe bombs or political assassinations or riots.

Or something actually constructive. But actually solving the problems that many organizations exist only to mitigate means you have to fight them, and they often win. Especially when people are led to believe that supporting those organizations is the way to eliminate the problems that they now exist to preserve.


> People with a criminal history who go back to a life of crime just get a gun through their criminal organization the same way they get the illegal drugs they're dealing.

just because they can have weapons somehow is not a reason to make it very easy and legal.

> people with a criminal history who reform themselves will commonly also carry a gun, for self-defense against criminals from their past life.

Firearm are not defense tools. If someone shoot you, I don't see how it will save your life or protect you.

> Banning possession of a technology is weak. If you wrongfully shoot someone, you should go to prison. If you have a gun and don't harm anyone with it, no one should have a problem with that.

I live in a country that ban guns, and I'm not aware of a reason why it would affect anyone's life negatively. There are certainly less death by firearm though.


> just because they can have weapons somehow is not a reason to make it very easy and legal.

Laws have costs and benefits. When the benefits are not actually realized in practice, that's relevant.

> Firearm are not defense tools. If someone shoot you, I don't see how it will save your life or protect you.

If someone is trying to kill you and you kill them first, this is more likely to lead to your survival than if you just let them kill you. And if this is more likely to happen, they are more likely to not attempt to kill you at risk to their own life.

This is especially relevant for people in bad neighborhoods where the police can't be expected to do this job or provide an effective deterrent, and many of the victims are people who have a criminal history.

An obvious and common case being where you get caught committing a crime, are pressured into testifying against someone else to avoid going to prison for ten years instead of one, and then you get out of prison and they or their people are after you.

> I live in a country that ban guns, and I'm not aware of a reason why it would affect anyone's life negatively. There are certainly less death by firearm though.

Ban red cars and there may be fewer accidents involving red cars, but is that really the right metric?

Firearms are aggressively prohibited in Mexico and they have an even bigger homicide problem than the US. There is a high rate of firearms ownership in Canada, and they don't. The reason for this difference is where we should direct our attention.


> If someone is trying to kill you and you kill them first, this is more likely to lead to your survival than if you just let them kill you. And if this is more likely to happen, they are more likely to not attempt to kill you at risk to their own life.

Maybe there is a gentleman rule among firearm owners to let the other side the opportunity to shoot first, but there is always the risk of someone not following that rule.


They can try to shoot first. That doesn't mean they always will, or that their first shot won't miss. Or that you won't still manage to shoot them even if they hit you first, the risk of which acts as a deterrent.


I guess criminals in your country use nice low damage weapons, in that case I guess it works.

In my country they seem to use some kind of automatic weapons, where the odds of really missing is low :) (I have seen some cars destroyed by such weapons, I'm not sure high precision is needed to be effective ^^)


> I live in a country that ban guns, and I'm not aware of a reason why it would affect anyone's life negatively.

I notice you haven't answered that part :)


In a country with a low violent crime rate, banning guns has no benefits, because you have a low violent crime rate. All you're doing is inconveniencing honest people using them for recreation or as a bulwark against prospective future government failure.

In a country with a high violent crime rate, victims need weapons for self defense. If you outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns.


Your terror group is someone else freedom fighter. What is celebrated today is scorned tomorrow.

Asking what if some group we want to stop uses a technology misses the point. Paper can be used by terrorist to make plans for terror and communicate should we reconsider paper? Who is to blame when paper and pen are used to do things we disapprove of?


There's a big difference here: paper is typically traceable to the source without much hassle. This tech is partially traceable to redistributors only.


That's a weak reason. I could make my own paper.


I think you missed the point. It's not about literally tracing the physical source of the paper. I mean the network of printing, distribution, any feedback, etc. leave traces where there's a fairly short chain of people to follow before you find the initial source. This is completely different from online distribution. No agency will complain if you distribute information on paper - they're more likely to say "thank you, please continue, we'd like to learn about your whole network of collaborators".


Yes, censorship resistant means censorship resistant. Over time it becomes more apparent that the desire for a "middle ground" between extremely regressive censorship and absolute freedom is incoherent, because if you give people even the slightest wiggle room, they can create systems like this. I personally prefer a world where I'm allowed to have a general purpose computer, and incidentally it's also possible for ISIS to post propaganda online.


Reminds me of government trying to get companies to install cryptography back doors. If the good guys can get in, then so can the bad guys.

Same with this. If bad guys can be censored then so can good guys.


Wouldn't be resistant to censorship if you could prevent people from putting videos you don't like on it, would it?


BitTorrent is so good and I am surprised that I don’t see it in more places

Using a private key for mutations is a great idea. I believe it is similar to how BitTorrent Live (undocumented) was implemented, where new content was added to a merkle tree. That is at least how RFC7574 proposed doing it


Bravo dude! Absolutely phenomenal work. I'm going to star this and attempt to tinker with it in a few days. I love seeing stuff like this get built, IMO the more interesting tools like this get built the better the world becomes.


Thank you so much!


Very nice work ! I wanted to do something similar a long time ago but never took the time. Congratulations !

A few points:

- is this using webtorrent-the-library or webtorrent-the-protocol ? If it's the latter it's a bit useless. The only reason the protocol exists is to make web browsers speak a similar language as bittorrent, but both protocols are strictly different. Which means if you want to talk both you need to implement both (and fortunately webtorrent-the-library does so)

- The Readme says this is good for whistleblowing. Actually this is one of the worst ways of doing it. When using DHT you tell the whole world your IP is interested in a specific content. When using bittorrent your IP connects with other peers interested in a specific content. There is nothing easier for LE than watching a specific content of interest and see who is interested in it: journalists, sources, ... An anonymisation layer is mandatory for this use case


What would an anonymisation layer be in this case? Would a dedicated VPN or Tor be enough?


Depends on your threat model. A VPN is enough if you're protecting against your neighbor, but whistleblowing usually means you're acting against a company or a government. Tor is the minimum for this, but is not even enough.


How is this different from ZeroNet [https://zeronet.io/]?


Also, it's a variation on the concept. It's really good when we have multiple implementations of a general design.


At a quick glance, no Bitcoin


No but Handshake does use coins which I assume to be some sort of blockchain "Handshake uses a coin system for name registration"


Iirc, zeronet used to not have bitcoin before the craze, so this would be like early zeronet I guess


Seems to be not much different from zeronet. It even makes the exact same mistakes like not building in anonymization by default (preferably using i2p). Zeronet hovever is much more mature and has a very active community.


Is it just me, or is that site down?


This is cool.

I'm also working on a decentralized distribution mechanism based on torrents, and while i've being working on a different architecture, the network mechanism are basically the same with a couple of differences on the network level.

In my case i'm working on a very customized version of chrome where the web api is actually available for native applications beyond Javascript.


That sounds interesting! I would love to hear more!


Have you considered routing through or utilizing the Session network as well? It's an improved version of Tor and you could possibly build this into a dApp on the Oxen network (oxen.io)


Sure. is there a way to contact you?


Using SMTP, publiusfederalist and then the email provider is tutanota (.com)!


Well done, good luck. Always wanted to implement something like this.

> dmt (mutable torrent BEP-46),

Is dmt supported (made scalable?!) by the existing torrent infra structure (DHT/trackers/etc??). Sorry if this question doesnt make sense.


Thank you! I believe it's somewhat scalable, but one thing to note is that DHT itself is not as fast as using a tracker.


Also, is this suitable for publishing an RSS-like feed which out polluting the world with a new torrent for each atom?


It depends. You an either have your mutable torrent point to the head of a liked list like this:

    head
    |
    |- post.txt
    +- prev.torrent

    prev
    |
    |- post.txt
    +- prev.torrent
You get the idea. With the not yet widely-supported BitTorrent v2, you can just add files to a new torrent and seeders of the old torrent will seed the files that are also in the new torrent too.


What are the challenges slowing the v2 deployment? Client uptake?


My reading of the situation is that for 99.99% of data currently transferred by Bittorrent, v1 works just fine. And for many use cases, the ability to do something like change an already created torrent would actually be detrimental. It's not that v2 is actively bad, it's just that it's designed for a different audience than currently uses Bittorrent, and will take time for that new audience to find it.


Yes and no - DMT (https://github.com/lmatteis/dmt) is implemented into this so you can use a single hash in the DHT for the 'site', but that will be updated to point to a new torrent infohash on every update.


How does this compare to IPFS+ENS (InterPlanetary File System + Ethereum Name Service)?


I would love it if someone could change my mind on this:

The words unblockable and uncensorable have been misused in the documentation.

Real-world example: 99% of my colleagues cannot bring their own devices into our corporate workplace to access torrents via DHT. There are some network rules and filters in place to block most non 443 traffic. Those 99% are effectively blocked.

Setting a remote HAProxy server to mask miscelaneous traffic as https was a practical way out through the firewall, which then exposed my HAProxy server to a block by IP rules.

This is an idea I'd love to be wrong about. Bock-resistant is the most appropriate statement for this project in its present form. Change my mind :)


You have to set up your https tunnel on AWS or GCP and then tunnel that to your own server. They will not range block AWS, and you can vary the IP every day.


There are projects who are using collateral freedom to block censorship like Wireleap (https://wireleap.com/blog/routing-layer/). This would help in the circumstance you describe.


How would you compare this in a use-case sense to something like Beaker browser?

Also -- and I'm unfamiliar with handshake -- but is the sort of thing that could work over ad hoc networks?


The Beaker browser looks interesting -- it looks a lot like DHT/DMT (https://hypercore-protocol.org/), but I speculate it's likely more specialized for the use case.

Handshake names are decentralized and on chain, so as long as you have access to read the chain, it would work over ad hoc networks as well (and offline/local).


This doesn't solve the problem that users have to host files themselves, which makes the network unsuitable for many use cases. With torrents and IPFS, only popular content will be hosted by voluntarists with varying levels of service.

This is the drawback of traditional decentralized networks compared to blockchain-based networks such as Sia/Skynet, where users can pay to get their files hosted with guaranteed service level.


You can pay seedbox services for hosting as well, but information the swarm cares about will continue to exist in the swarm. That being said, I think Sia/Skynet is a beautiful project and recommend everyone to check it out as well. I also saw a few other great projects listed in this thread which all sound fascinating.


Very cool and actualized proof-of-concept. "Decentralization" beyond a marketing term.


This is what decentralization is about, not crypto.


this literally uses a cryptocurrency (handshake) for domains


There's a dilemma as the magnet links/hashes aren't easily shareable. One option is to create a DMT directory, but this would be centralized. Handshake is the most mature decentralized domain name project, and I opted for it. It uses coins to limit abuse, since anyone can flood a decentralized system. You don't need coins to browse and use federalist. That said, if there are any other immutable DNS systems that aren't centrally controlled that I could review, I'll definitely take a look!


ENS (Ethereum Naming Service) is built on immutable smart contracts on Ethereum. Domain names (ie example.eth) are permissionlessly registered for up to hundreds of years at a time for ~$5 a year.

ENS domains can be resolved to Ethereum wallet addresses, IPFS, Bitcoin addresses or any other public key or string.


ENS seems to be centralized on to one smart contract holding all the domains under the .eth TLD (which already conflicts with the reserved 3 letter TLD for Ethiopia) under the control of a typical 'multisig' and 'DAO' which is based on 'trusting' the keyholders.

Basically ENS boils down to being a subdomain provider with ICANN-like governance, an illusion to 'decentralization'.


It's not one smart contract, it's actually many smart contracts and many open-source front-end components: https://github.com/ensdomains

The three letter code is not currently used by Ethiopia (they use .et and .com.et), and the ENS team is in negotiations with Ethiopia for the 3 letter TLD: https://www.olipso.com/en/domain-search/ethiopia https://twitter.com/BrantlyMillegan/status/14632165646149672...

The contracts themselves are immutable. ENS domains are NFTs. You should read the code and understand the actual structure of it before criticizing it.

https://docs.ens.domains/dapp-developer-guide/ens-as-nft


> The three letter code is not currently used by Ethiopia (they use .et and .com.et), and the ENS team is in negotiations with Ethiopia for the 3 letter TLD

Did I say 'used'? I said 'reserved' and the ENS team knows it is 'reserved' FOR Ethiopia, otherwise why are they negotiating specifically with them in the first place?

Relying on 'trusting' a so-called 'DAO' with all .eth domains sitting under the root multisig control is no different to trusting a subdomain provider with ICANN-like governance but this time, they're using a 'blockchain'.

All of the above sounds like a great 'illusion' to decentralization. I expect ENS to be no different to ICANN governance given that they can have full control over any of the domains on the ENS root. [0]

[0] https://docs.ens.domains/frequently-asked-questions#who-owns...


My comment was not intended as a criticism of your project (which seems excellent), but rather an observation that crypto may be more useful than the parent had assumed.


Thank you, and no criticism taken! I agree. The problem with projects that incorporate cryptocurrencies these days has been that the cryptocurrencies themselves have been the focus and sometimes these projects have been going out of their way to incorporate them, in addition to a lot of projected hopes of what a system could one day become, not the reality of the utility of the system itself, today.


FWIW, Unstoppable Domains is already supported by both Brave and Opera (which I found interesting), and, from my determination, has a much greater chance of even more widespread adoption (due to it not being such a conflict with ICANN). (It has its own issues, but I frankly feel like all of these projects are still a bit "sketch". That said, I am not really pro- the premise of websites relying on permanent human-mappable identifiers in the first place, as I feel there are a ton of philosophical failings that people mostly just try to pretend don't exist down that road. I would much prefer projects like this just use EVM addresses as their underlying address and then users could potentially allow ENS names to map to those if they absolutely must have names locally, but then the names aren't really the canonical bits: permanent unique names just have too many moral landmines to be acceptable.)


> magnet links/hashes aren't easily shareable.

I'm OK with this (and that's more or less what IPFS does), you only need to pin a couple hashes, and one could build a website directory using this project. Or even a recursive DNS with zone delegation to other mutable torrents.

I like the idea of outgoing links being other hashes.


There’s ENS, which seems on sturdier footing than Handshake to me, but the gas on ethereum is ridiculous


ENS is adding layer 2 support soon. While gas sucks on layer 1, since it's only ~$5 a year for the domain, you can register something for like 10-20 years for not much more than the cost to register for one year (gas considered).


Isn't Ethereum moving to Proof of Stake though?


Yes, but PoS will not solve the problem of gas fees. Gas fees only come down when network capacity is higher than its demand.

Layer-2 systems (which allow some of the operations to happen off-chain) is how Ethereum developers are trying to scale the network capacity.


My worry with Ethereum is that moving to proof of stake changes the project from a decentralized one to something a little less so.


Would you like to check how many people are running ETH2.0 validators [0] vs how many people are running Handshake nodes?

[0]: https://launchpad.ethereum.org/en/


Are you not concerned about the decentralization of Handshake's PoW consensus, considering that it uses a custom hashing algo that seems to be dominated in hardware production by a single company, Goldshell?

I believe you may be missing the forest for the trees by worrying about Ethereum's decentralization when compared to Handshake's.


Have you checkout out the Gnu Name System from GNUNet?


The website for GNUnet seems to be down/404, but it looks like ownership of names is controlled by a central authority (https://manpages.debian.org/unstable/gnunet/gnunet-namestore...).


If you want to do anything decentralized, I highly recommend to read all of the scientific papers from the gnunet authors. They theoretically solved a lot of problems a long time ago that modern distributed projects keep repeating. About the name system: It is a bit more complex than that. Everybody can "create" a domain, but others must import it's public key, somewhat compatible to a hosts file. The trick is that each domain can have arbitrary subdomains, also stored in the DHT. Now one can construct arbitrary deep trees. And everyone can choose a list of their trusted TLDs, and use them to resolve names. Say site.alice.bob.gnu (where .gnu is shipped with the client as default) and if I personally decide to trust Alice directly, I put her public key into my config file and from now on I can use site.alice instead without ever touching bob.gnu or .gnu again. Their DHT comes with unusual privacy guarantees due to clever cryptography. Furthermore gnunet already researched filesharing using content addressed blocks to allow for deduplication. Very clever. Unfortunately the implementation is not very usable and kind of stale. Some of these file sharing concepts are also better implemented by Freenet, which is a kind of anonymous decentralized web, even somewhat usable. A pity that those projects seem kind of stuck.


> The trick is that each domain can have arbitrary subdomains, also stored in the DHT. Now one can construct arbitrary deep trees. And everyone can choose a list of their trusted TLDs, and use them to resolve names. Say site.alice.bob.gnu (where .gnu is shipped with the client as default) and if I personally decide to trust Alice directly, I put her public key into my config file and from now on I can use site.alice instead without ever touching bob.gnu or .gnu again.

Which is ridiculous -- it makes names unreliable as public identifiers. Sure, you can refer to Alice's site as "site.alice", but nobody else can resolve that name unless they share your configuration. Worse, it means that anyone who has a different key mapped as "alice" might see "site.alice" resolve to something completely different than what you see.


In practice it'd probably end up like the sources.list in Debian. E.g., an enormous number of users just use whatever pasta is copied in there by default. Then special devs change it or copypaste a Debian spell to magically add repos for whatever special cases they have.

And let's be honest-- if someone on HN were to post, "OMG the security updates repo got DDOS'd in Debian" it's not like the entire comment section is going to be filled with confused responses like, "Wait, do you mean the security updates for the gitlab repo that I added for my gitlab instance, or Debian's security repo for Debian the Universal Operating System?"


It's fully decentralized from what I remember.

Looks like Christian did a quick 4 minute synopsis here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bB9SC4kD27Y

If you like the idea of both the decentralized resolution and using the DHT as a PIR, you might look into it.

Also-- if you find it's the case that it's not currently usable (which I'm guessing is the case), it might be worthwhile to mention on your README that you looked at this as an option and then briefly state the reason(s) why you can't use it in practice. If enough prospective users of gnunet do this it may motivate the maintainers to do something about the current state of the documentation and usability...


I think the evolution of "decentralized" infrastructure will start to bring out a lot more overlap between "traditional" decentralization communities (building stuff like Beaker browser) and some of the useful bits of crypto.


> some of the useful bits of crypto

There is actually a ton of interesting and useful innovation happening in the crypto space that isn’t necessarily crypto-specific. If hacker news wasn’t so die-hard anti-crypto then more people would see that.

- zero-knowledge proofs

- quadratic funding

- verkle trees

- etc.


At the same time, I think it's a lot to expect of people to wade through the feverish speculative bubble to make sense of what technology is interesting. I think it would be nice if some of this stuff started making its way out of currency associated blockchain projects and into the wider world of decentralized algorithms and protocols.


Yes, I think this is both the biggest opportunity, and the biggest challenge, especially as I think there's been a growing separation between those two communities in the last few months and years. There's so many good ideas and implementations (and investment in harder problems of distributed systems) in the crypto/blockchain/web3 space, and a lot of hard-won experience and genuine applications in, as you say, "traditional" communities. It's just a matter of finding some sort of common ground.

I do think that the https://getdweb.net/ community is a model of how that crossover can work. It's also something I think a lot about at FFDW, which because of IPFS and Filecoin, has its feet in both camps.


Made my day. Thanks.


I thought Handshake looked nice, but it turned out to be just more crypto and coins.


How would you solve the problem of spam and squatting without the network requiring payment for domains?

Subsequently, how else besides using a crypto coin would it be feasible for a decentralized network to take payment?


Good question, I’m just not satisfied with this answer.

Requiring some form of payment is fine, but I’d like the ‘currency’ to be locked into the network so it doesn’t become something you can trade.

Maybe contribute to the network in exchange for a balance, that you can then exchange for domains after which it’s gone.

Ideally also figure out a way to limit people simply creating many accounts and using that, guess you can require upkeep for all domains, so when you stop contributing they disappear.


How would you accomplish PKI in such a way that would allow people to rotate keys to keep their account secure, but without allowing them to rotate their key into a different person's custody, thus doing a de-facto transaction that would enable someone to integrate the system with an exchange and put a price on account balances?

Also, what kind of consensus mechanism would you use, with the understanding that without a way to transfer/sell balances, Proof of Work degenerates quickly into a 51% attack, and Proof of Stake is infeasible? Or do you have a different idea in mind to decentralize such a system?

I'm asking these questions because knowing what I do about decentralized systems, in the end I can't see any way around a system like this having transferable balances. Either that or you centralize the part of it that keeps track of the network's history, making it basically akin to a big git repository.


> without allowing them to rotate their key into a different person's custody, thus doing a de-facto transaction that would enable someone to integrate the system with an exchange and put a price on account balances?

I don’t think this is possible in the first place. Someone will always be able to go around the system entirely and give someone their entire account. If somone wishes to sell all their names at the same time (or make one account per domain so they can sell it), there’s little to prevent that. I think making it harder is probably more trouble than it is worth for most malicious actors though (especially as they have to work with each individual account to retain the domains).

As to consensus mechanism, I have no idea. I don’t have enough experience with such systems to say one way or another.


> Maybe contribute to the network in exchange for a balance, that you can then exchange for domains after which it’s gone.

You've just described handshake - when you purchase a domain, the coins are burned in exchange for the domain.


Just that one part? Or everything? I’m not quite sure how Handshake is generating balance in the first place, beyond a lot of mentions of coins and exchange tickers.


I know I'm a few days late to this reply, but Handshake is a Proof of Work system like Bitcoin. You generate balances by mining it using a powerful computing device.


Crypto is a piece of the puzzle.


Seems cool at first glance! I've never heard of Handshake, will be looking at that more in particular.

So I see the address in the screenshot starts with federalist://

Is it possible to access these sites with a normal web browser from the internet too?


Thank you!

I do think there is a way - since the beautiful WebTorrent (https://github.com/webtorrent/webtorrent) can do so in browser. I'm keen to see something like this in a normal web browser (if possible as an extension even), hopefully developed by someone with better skills than me haha!


from the look of it, you will need to have the handshake resolver installed and replaced as your local dns resolver. With that it will return you a the public key address on the bittorrent DHT which can be solved by some torrent client.

There it should have a torrent info payload that your client can turn into a ordinary torrent, where you can proceed to download the files, and can open in your browser on your local filesystem.


I cloned it. I don't see how to get to the publius or federalist scripts. I wanted to try to create a blog; is this documented somewhere?

It's an exciting project.


For federalist:

git clone https://github.com/publiusfederalist/federalist

cd federalist

npm install

npm start

For publius, there are two options, I'll start with option 1, which is an immutable (no updates) model:

git clone https://github.com/publiusfederalist/publius

cd publius

npm install webtorrent supercop.js

./key

./publius &

Then you can either share that magnet link/browse that link, or take the further step to add it as a TXT record on the Handshake blockchain for a name.

If you would like to do it mutably, there is an additional step:

./seed &

Then, you can share the link created by this and create the TXT record with this one instead.

When you update your blog, you can edit the files in the web3root folder, and then simply restart publius and seed.


Seems a great project! I've always dreamed creating something like this! One thing I want to know is, your project support users' anonymity?


Out of the box, there is no anonymity built into federalist. You can use Tor or VPN to for anonymity. As this develops from a POC for developers to an end user software application, I imagine federalist will have many of these things built in directly or support to hook in (eg Tor and SOCKS) natively.


How did this thread about a decentralised serverless I internet protocol end up in a debate about US gun policy?


As the saying goes - ‘The road to hell is paved with good intensions’.


> This is great for blogging, whistle blowing, and other things.

Could this support user authentication for uploading content? Maybe with something like metamask?

Using this tech to make a medium/substack/twitter-style site would lower the barrier to entry for non-technical journalists.


WebTorrent has never worked for me. It's included in Brave now but whenever I try to open a magnet link it just sits and waits while qbittorrent downlads everything i before I can manage to make a cup of coffee.


> Can WebTorrent clients connect to normal BitTorrent clients?

> In the browser, WebTorrent can only download torrents that are seeded by a WebRTC-capable torrent client.

https://webtorrent.io/faq


Instead of blockchain/web3, I wish these type of projects would pop up more. They are drowned (in my circles) out by 'decentralized everything blockchain' hype... we need this indeed.


This does use blockchain...


Only the 'DNS' though right? Just the full-in-for-everything should be less as it does not work. But thanks for the correction.


Would this work over I2P?


BitTorrent works on I2P so I believe this should as well but I haven't tried.


Hi, thank you for this! Is it wrong to say that without going through a privacy layer like I2P, you'd publicly link your IP to the decentralized websites you visit?


That is correct without I2P, Tor or a VPN.


Tor doesn't support UDP so I don't think it would work.


What are some cool websites that I can visit right now?


It's new, so I don't think there are many out there yet. I do hope that this changes the landscape of the ecosystem for 'decentralization.' It's not supposed to be about tokens or organizational marketing hype. First, it's about free speech and freedom of information. "De-platforming" is now extinct. Only then, can you even begin to discuss anything else.

I'm very thankful to WebTorrent, DMT, Handshake and Electron for making things possible.


Thanks, the work done is definitely cool but, as with any other decentralization project, I’m yet to find the content use cases.

The only two kinds of successful content types that I’m aware of are pirated movies on Torrent and cryptocurrencies on the blockchain. They all depend on centralized discovery(torrent websites and exchanges).

Which makes me wonder, are these decentralized websites or social media platforms attacking the right problems?


> I’m yet to find the content use cases.

It's an alternative transport, not application layer. If you can imagine doing anything with the world wide web , or ftp, you can imagine what this is for. It can transport hypertext files around, or whatever other file type you want.

In the web case, it'd just be some local http files you could open in a local file origin. There'd be no server. But that's still a way to exchange whatever art or media you could ever imagine.

We are bounded only by imagination. The internet is built around the Internet Protocol (IP), a way of streaming data arbitrarily from one computer to another. It has been up to us to imagine uses, to chase new possibilities. What do you think the use cases for IP are? Can you see what that made possible? Your question is in effect that, and trying to grasp at how broad, how possible, how potentiated this great work is is dauntingly hard, for we could share any type of content we want with either.


If someone wants to make a new kind of torrent website with federalist that doesn't rely on centralized servers, they now can! It would be helpful for me when I download my Ubuntu ISOs. ;)


Deplatforming still exists while any curated platform still exists, which will (hopefully) be always.

It shouldn't be possible for you to end up with nowhere to speak, that's why the public square exists, and I accept there is a need for an online public square that is currently pseudo-fufilled by private social media sites, but that doesn't mean deplatforming is bad.

Freedom of expression includes the freedom not to endorse or express an idea, and platforms shouldn't be forced to allow people to use them to amplify their speech, as then that right is violated, enforced expression is just as harmful as enforced silence.


You seem to be arguing yourself in a circle.


Would you care to expand? I think my point is sound and relatively simple: deplatforming isn't the problem, the lack of a public square is. Deplatforming is, in itself, a form of protected expression.


If the prohibition of deplatforming is why we need a public square, it does sound inconsistent to say deplatforming isn't the problem.

"The problem isn't deplatforming -- it's the lack of places where deplatforming is prohibited."


How is that inconsistent? Just because it's good to have access to something doesn't mean we want it everywhere.

This goes for a lot of things. It would be a problem if there was nowhere you could urinate, but that doesn't make rules against urinating in the street bad.

It is important that there are places you can't be censored, but that doesn't mean every place should be forced to be unfiltered firehoses. Curation has value. Should every newspaper be forced to platform anyone who sends them an article?

Enforced speech is just as harmful as prohibited speech. People should have the right to choose who they platform.


Whether "we want it everywhere" and whether "it is the problem" are different questions.

> It would be a problem if there was nowhere you could urinate, but that doesn't make rules against urinating in the street bad.

If you couldn't urinate anywhere legally, you wouldn't consider the laws against urination a problem?


I wouldn't advocate for laws against urination being "extinct", as the post I replied to did with de-platforming, no. I'd push for toilets, not the ability to piss in the street.


this is actually nice, imagine a world where devices have software like this and acts as a node, so like install it on your smart coffee pot, tv, etc. seems silly but i think as time progresses and as technology advances and gets cheaper and cheaper to build that we will one day have normal everyday appliances os's in them, maybe even a type of wifi that will eventually create mesh networks


Downloading, setting up and having a look. Using IPFS/IPLD at the moment. Will give feedback later


i remember dreaming about something like this almost 20 years ago, when understanding torrents drew me into learning about networking and computing generally. huge props, it fills me with a warm feeling to see that these systems are not just possible but manifest.


What would happen if I created an illegal site? CP or selling guns?


If you created and seeded long enough to get active traffic, the host and DHT peer IPs might be flagged by LE. Once flagged the IP info passed to different investigators for prosecution purposes. Depending on your level of anonymity (VPN, tor, none, other) the investigation is either a dead-end or success. If success, warrant granted, home searched, PC seized. That's one potential scenario.


But they can't take down the website?


People don’t have to use your website.


Presumably nobody would know it was yours until you added contact information to it.


How do you handle security updates to Chromium?


This project has just begun and is still in its infancy. My hope is that the community will come together to take it to another level. Chromium updates are generally handled by the Electron team!


Does this mitigate any aspect of DDOS?


Is there a mobile client?



Good catch!

It's temporarily using hdns.io as many people still do not have an hsd node installed. A later version will be shipped with a light weight SPV resolver, at which point, the last piece of the puzzle will be complete.


These sorts of things are still blockable through DNS and IP filters cutting off access to the root nodes and such I would guess.

As such, what is the use case?


Seeds for the torrents can change and, although not recommended, in terms of bloating the Tor network, using Tor will also help. With the recent attack on exposing Tor users, it may not be a bad thing if everyone starts torrenting on the Tor network actually.

Everything, of course, can be blocked at some point, but the thing to remember is that there are other kinds of contracts that existed long before smart contracts - and these things are already leveraged in society.

The internet isn't going to disappear tomorrow, but I would agree there are longer term risks, so let's build today.

There's been a lot of talk about decentralization lately, and Cypherpunks write code. So I wrote code instead of a blog post.


Wow that's a big huge dollop of nihilism, of why even bother. It's very unclear what your slam even means, what you are trying, technically, to express as the problem. Which makes your rejection even harder to handle with faith & respect.

I also don't think it's accurate. Handshake is a cryptographically certified way of establishing identity . Since torrents are now mutable via handshake, it seems like webtorrents can be updated & moved as needed. Further, peer-exchange processes mean that having the initial seeds up probably isn't even a requirement. Even if one particular ip address or site gets cut down, the swarm can use other webtorrent trackers to re-spawn & carry-on.

Aside from your criticism being either inaccureate or misleading, I'd also say the use case doesn't need to, imo, be 100% perfect in every way to be worthwhile. I'm glad someone did seek better, & bothered. A decentralized, updateable, browser-based torrent is incredible leap for a web of data, for interconnection. Even if it's not 100% completely uncensorable, it's many leaps in the right direction, towards decentralization. Especially decentralization without coordination/consensus, which I think is great & vast improvement over the harsh & strict type of computing that *coins have dominated the field with. This work is far more interesting to me.


You are assuming bad faith here.

The project is marketed as unblockable, etc and yet we both conclude it is blockable from the start with existing network management tools that are deployed in places like Iran and China.

I was asking a genuine question of use case.


Block-resistant and censorship-resistant are terminology I've seen used in other projects. I agree that ublockable and uncensorable are hard phrases to sell here, they kind of immediately beg to be challenged.


[flagged]


Please don't argue in the flamewar style on HN. We want curious conversation here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html


> Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.

I very much think resolving this conversation is of the utmost importance, is absolutely core to the topic at hand. There should at least be some idea of what the criticism here is. I would really like to see that.

I have not at all been perfect. But I have tried to surface technics, to get to the heart of the technical matters at hand. To illuminate & increase the information here, in the core topics at hand.

I respect your intervention here dang & agree this is going bad. And I could improve. But I think I am very very very narrowly not-passing here, and this seems like an essential defense to me. I've been wanting very badly to get to the real topic, to affirm & help us to work with the next HN rule after "Eschew flamebait":

> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.




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