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| | |.---.-..----.| |--..-----..----. | | |.-----..--.--.--..-----.
| || _ || __|| < | -__|| _| | || -__|| | | ||__ --|
|___|___||___._||____||__|__||_____||__| |__|____||_____||________||_____|
on Gopher (inofficial)
URI Visit Hacker News on the Web
COMMENT PAGE FOR:
URI Peerweb: Decentralized website hosting via WebTorrent
tiku wrote 1 hour 29 min ago:
Napster.. so what happens if peerweb.lol goes down?
kkfx wrote 1 hour 57 min ago:
In the past ZeroNet was performant enough to realistically share
websites but it's abandoned (ZeroNet Conservacy exist but no active
peers seems to exists) this allow client to use an website without
installing anything, which is nice, but how to get things visible
initially it's well... A human challenge...
als0 wrote 1 hour 59 min ago:
Why does every sentence have an emoji?
keepamovin wrote 2 hours 30 min ago:
I'm glad to see this was not unexpectedly fast to load. Would not want
to upset those distributed expectations! I wonder if there's a business
model in selling speed on a robust network that is on average too slow.
Is there anyway to incentivize more nodes through micropayments
distributed from people who pay for their site to be served faster?
Ultimately I guess the distributed web is felled by economics thus far.
likiiio wrote 2 hours 43 min ago:
Can sanitation be disabled? I.e. can this be used to access static
websites as-is?
bawolff wrote 4 hours 53 min ago:
> Enhanced security with DOMPurify integration!
> XSS Protection - All HTML sanitized with DOMPurify
> Malicious Code Removal - Dangerous tags and attributes filtered
> Sandboxed Execution - Sites run in isolated iframe environment
I don't think that super makes sense. You probably just want the iframe
sandbox and not remove all js. Or ideally put the torrent hash as the
subdomain to use same origin policy.
kruhft wrote 6 hours 5 min ago:
This is probably going to be taken down like my site was that used Web
Torrent.
dropclickpaste.com is for sale. kruhft.at.gmail.com
1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote 7 hours 34 min ago:
No Javascript [1] /releases/expanded_ass...
If the address is a hash perhaps it could contain a public key
URI [1]: https://github.com/Omodaka9375/peerweb
URI [2]: https://github.com/Omodaka9375/peerweb/releases/expanded_asset...
wackget wrote 7 hours 42 min ago:
Nice idea. Shame absolutely everything about the website screams AI
slop.
misir wrote 10 hours 53 min ago:
I wonder if these colors are a kind of a watermark that are hardcoded
as system instructions. Almost all slopware made using claude have the
same color palette. So much for a random token generator to be this
consistent
orbital-decay wrote 8 hours 47 min ago:
[1] Ask any modern (post-GPT-2) LLM about a random color/name/city
repeatedly a few dozen times, and you'll see it's not that random.
You can influence this with a prompt, obviously, but if the prompt
stays the same each time, the output is always very similar despite
the existence of thousands of valid alternatives. Which is the case
for any vibecoded thing that doesn't specify the color palette, in
particular.
This effect is largely responsible for slop (as in annoying
stereotypes). It's fixable in principle, but there's pretty little
research and I don't see big AI shops care enough.
URI [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_collapse
karanSF wrote 10 hours 22 min ago:
Emojis on every line are an AI tell. The times I do use AI (shhhh...)
I always remove them and tweak the language a bit.
rudhdb773b wrote 6 hours 53 min ago:
Isn't it mostly ChatGPT that does that?
Grok almost never uses emojis.
netule wrote 9 hours 30 min ago:
Before LLMs became big, I used emojis in my PRs and merge requests
for fun and to break up the monotony a bit. Now I avoid them, lest
I be accused of being a bot.
IhateAI wrote 10 hours 48 min ago:
Yep, and I refuse to use sites that look like this. Lovable built
frontend/landing pages have a similar feel. Instant lost of trust and
desire to try it out.
bawolff wrote 4 hours 57 min ago:
Its interesting - AI has a certain style. You can see it in
pictures and even text content. It does instantly get my guard up.
j45 wrote 9 hours 26 min ago:
That's interesting - do you think because it's familiar to you?
Would it be the case for folks who don't have any idea what Lovable
is.
Familiar UI is similar to what Tailwind or Bootstrap offers, do
they do something different to keep it fresh?
Average internet users/consumers are likely used to the default
Shopify checkout.
IhateAI wrote 8 hours 18 min ago:
Its probably more of a me "problem". But I'm sure there are
plenty of others that share my sentiment. It doesn't really have
anything to do with it being familiar, familiar can be good, but
what I'm talking about is a familiar ugliness and lack of
intention.
The Stripe or Shopify checkout is familiar, but it only became
familiar because it was well designed and people wanted to keep
using it.
Also when its obvious someone used an LLM, it bleeds into my
overall opinion of the product whether the product is good or
not. I assume less effort was put into the project, which is
probably a fair assumption.
DJBunnies wrote 10 hours 55 min ago:
Every time I try these they never work, including this one.
Iâm not sure what the value prop is over just using a torrent client?
Maybe when theyâre less buggy theyâll become a thing.
bawolff wrote 4 hours 59 min ago:
If it actually worked i could certainly see the value prop of not
making users download a separate program. Generally downloading a
separate program is a pretty big ask.
Sephr wrote 8 hours 46 min ago:
I'm planning to eventually launch an open source platform with the
same name (peerweb.com) that I hope will be vastly more usable, with
a distributed anti-abuse protocol, automatic asset distribution
prioritization for highly-requested files, streaming UGC APIs (e.g.
start uploading a video and immediately get a working sharable link
before upload completion), proper integration with site URLs (no ugly
uuids etc. visible or required in your site URLs), and adjustable
latency thresholds to failover to normal CDNs whenever peers take too
long to respond.
I put the project on hiatus years ago but I'm starting it back up
soon! My project is not vibe coded and has thus far been manually
architected with a deep consideration for both user and site owner
expectations in the web ecosystem.
bricss wrote 10 hours 59 min ago:
Somebody has to revive Nullsoft WASTE p2p from 2003 tho
fooker wrote 11 hours 9 min ago:
What do you all think of the chances that we have decentralized AI
infrastructure like this at some point?
littlecranky67 wrote 12 hours 53 min ago:
Cool. Some people complained about broken demos, I uploaded the
mdwiki.info [1] website unaltered and seems to work fine [0]. MDwiki is
a single .html file that fetches custom markdown via ajax relative to
the html file and renders it via Javascript.
[0]: [1]:
URI [1]: https://peerweb.lol/?orc=b549f37bb4519d1abd2952483610b8078e6e5...
URI [2]: https://dynalon.github.io/mdwiki/
Timwi wrote 11 hours 10 min ago:
Why is it called MDwiki? It's clearly not a wiki.
littlecranky67 wrote 3 hours 55 min ago:
The idea is to host it on github, and people send changes to the
content via pull requests (vs. editing like in wikipedia). There is
no backend, just plain files.
jmercouris wrote 10 hours 25 min ago:
Sure, in a sense, but âwikiâ actually just means âquickâ.
Uptrenda wrote 13 hours 5 min ago:
I feel like if it were combined with federated caching servers it would
actually work. Then you would have persistence and the p2p part helps
take load off popular content. There are now P2P databases that seem to
operate with this. Combining the best of both worlds.
rickcarlino wrote 13 hours 22 min ago:
Similar project I vibe coded a few weeks ago: "Gnutella/Limewire but
WebRTC". [1] It works, though probably needs some cleanup and security
review before being used seriously (thus no running public instance).
URI [1]: https://github.com/RickCarlino/hazelhop
dpweb wrote 13 hours 24 min ago:
Useless if it takes > 5 sec. to load a page
TuringTest wrote 11 hours 47 min ago:
You never lived the 90's
alfiedotwtf wrote 7 hours 42 min ago:
lol.
Not only did it take > 5 seconds to load a page, images were
progressively loaded as fast as two at a time over the next minute
or so - if there were no errors during transfer!
journal wrote 13 hours 34 min ago:
i wish stuff like this was more like double-click, agree, and use. they
always make it complicated to where you're spending time trying to
understand if you should continue to spend more time on this.
logicallee wrote 13 hours 39 min ago:
I tried this, the functional "Functionality test page:" is stuck on
"Loading peer web site... connecting to peers". I can't load any
website from this.
URI [1]: https://imgur.com/gallery/loaidng-peerweb-site-uICLGhK
davidcollantes wrote 13 hours 30 min ago:
Yes, none work for me. They either donât have peers, or the few
ones are on a very slow network.
SLWW wrote 14 hours 1 min ago:
I can't imagine that Peerweb has much in the way of stopping certain
types of material from being uploaded.
j45 wrote 9 hours 30 min ago:
Smaller site likely have a smaller footprint
b00ty4breakfast wrote 12 hours 16 min ago:
you can't stop someone from verbally describing certain objectionable
material, therefore we should regulate the medium thru which sound
travels and suck up all the oxygen on the planet. it's the only way
to save the children
cyrusradfar wrote 14 hours 13 min ago:
OT: Can someone vibe-code Geocities back to life?
800xl wrote 13 hours 53 min ago:
Check out neocities.org
cyrusradfar wrote 12 hours 31 min ago:
you made my life. Thank you life long internet friend.
AreShoesFeet000 wrote 14 hours 4 min ago:
give me the tokens.
ipaddr wrote 14 hours 9 min ago:
That would take forever. If you can get the domain I'll hand code it
in perl.
awesome_dude wrote 13 hours 16 min ago:
Neat!!
gnarbarian wrote 14 hours 15 min ago:
love this. I've been working on something similar for months now [1]
it's a gpgpu decentralized heterogeneous hpc p2p compute platform that
runs in the browser
URI [1]: https://metaversejs.github.io/peercompute/
dcreater wrote 14 hours 27 min ago:
Good, important idea. Unfortunately bad, low effort vibe coded
execution
j45 wrote 9 hours 25 min ago:
Still a shipped idea, driven by someone. The author has some other
interesting ideas.
dana321 wrote 14 hours 29 min ago:
None of the demo sites work for me.
Probably needs more testing and debugging.
BrouteMinou wrote 14 hours 30 min ago:
Nice, I clicked on the first demo, and I got stuck at connecting with
peers.
I like the idea though.
kamranjon wrote 14 hours 33 min ago:
I think one of the values of (what appears to be) AI generated projects
like this is that they can make me aware of the underlying technology
that I might not have heard about - for example WebTorrent: [1] Pretty
cool! Not sure what this offers over WebTorrent itself, but I was happy
to learn about its existence.
URI [1]: https://webtorrent.io/faq
mcjiggerlog wrote 14 hours 46 min ago:
This is cool - I actually worked on something similar way back in the
day: [1] . It avoided the need to have any kind of intermediary website
entirely.
The cool thing was it worked at the browser level using experimental
libdweb support, though that has unfortunately since been abandoned.
You could literally load URLs like wtp://tomjwatson.com/blog directly
in your browser.
URI [1]: https://github.com/tom-james-watson/wtp-ext
astrobe_ wrote 4 hours 10 min ago:
What were your plans for advertising website updates? Classic RSS
feed or something else?
mcjiggerlog wrote 3 hours 56 min ago:
At the time there was a bit of momentum behind the idea of mutable
torrents:
URI [1]: https://torrentfreak.com/mutable-torrents-proposal-makes-b...
j45 wrote 14 hours 59 min ago:
In its own reimagined way from whatâs possible in 2026, this could
kick off a new kind of geocities.
xd1936 wrote 15 hours 5 min ago:
Fun! I wish WebTorrent had caught on more. I've always thought it had a
worthy place in the modern P2P conversation.
In 2020, I messed around with a PoC for what hosting and distributing
Linux distros could look like using WebTorrent[1]. The protocol project
as a whole has a lovely and brilliant design but has stayed mostly
stagnant in recent years. There are only a couple of WebRTC-enabled
torrent trackers that have remained active and stable.
1.
URI [1]: https://github.com/leoherzog/LinuxExchange
bluedino wrote 12 hours 35 min ago:
Was there ever a web-based Jigdo?
r14c wrote 13 hours 42 min ago:
I think the issue has generally been that web torrent doesn't work
enough like the real thing to do its job properly. There are huge bit
torrent based streaming media networks out there, illicit, sure, but
its a proven technology. If browsers had real torrent clients we
would be having a very different conversation imo
I don't remember the web torrent issue numbers off the top of my
head, but there are a number of long standing issues that seem
blocked on webrtc limitations.
1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote 7 hours 48 min ago:
"If browsers had real torrent clients we would be having a very
different conversation imo"
The elinks text-only browser has a "real" torrent client
embedding-shape wrote 13 hours 11 min ago:
I think we still have the same blocker as we had back when
WebTorrent first appeared; browsers cannot be real torrent clients
and open connections without some initial routing for the
discovery, and they cannot open bi-directional unordered
connections between two browsers.
If we could say do peer discovery via Bluetooth, and open sockets
directly from a browser page, we could in theory have local-first
websites running in the browser, that does P2P connections straight
between browsers.
miki123211 wrote 5 hours 35 min ago:
Could you run some kind of hybrid DHT where part of it was Webrtc
and part was plain HTTP(S) / WebSocket?
There are some nodes (desktop clients with UPNP, dedicated
servers) that can accept browser connections. Those nodes could
then help you exchange offers/answers to give you connections
with the Webrtc-only ones, and those could facilitate
offer/answer exchanges with their peers in turn.
It'd be dog-slow compared to the single-udp-packet-in,
single-udp-packet-out philosophy of traditional mainline DHT, but
I don't see why the idea couldn't work in principle.
I think a much bigger problem is content discovery and update
distribution. You can't really do decentralized search because
it'd very quickly get sybil-attacked to death. You'd always need
some kind of centralized, trusted content index, but not
necessarily one hosted on a centralized server. If you could have
a reliable way to go from a pubkey to the latest hash signed by
that pubkey in a decentralized way, + E.G. a Sqlite extension to
get pages on-demand via WebTorrent, that would get you a long way
towards solving the problem.
namibj wrote 5 hours 9 min ago:
That was you ask exists; it updates through a version counter.
It just works on mainline DHT btw.
Seattle3503 wrote 11 hours 6 min ago:
If a tracker could be connected to via WebRTC and had additional
STUN functionality, would that suffice? Are there additional
WebRTC limitations?
> they cannot open bi-directional unordered connections between
two browsers.
Last I checked, DataChannels were bidirectional
embedding-shape wrote 10 hours 53 min ago:
Yes, but it's STUN that sucks. If the software ships with a
public (on the internet) relay/STUN server for connecting the
two clients, it won't work if either aren't connected to the
internet, even though the clients could still be on the same
network and reach each other.
westurner wrote 7 hours 3 min ago:
/? STUN: [1] There is a Native Sockets spec draft that only
Chrome implements;
"Direct Sockets API": [2] :
> The Direct Sockets API addresses this limitation by
enabling Isolated Web Apps (IWAs) to establish direct TCP and
UDP connections without a relay server. With IWAs, thanks to
additional security measuresâsuch as strict Content
Security Policy (CSP) and cross-origin isolationâ this API
can be safely exposed.
Though there's UPNP XML, it lacks auth for port forwarding
permissions. There's also IPV6.
Similar: "Breaking the QR Limit: The Discovery of a
Serverless WebRTC Protocol â Magarcia" [3] re: Quick Share,
Wi-Fi Direct, Wi-Fi Aware, BLE Beacons, BSSIDs and the
Geolocation API
URI [1]: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=...
URI [2]: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/iwa/direct-sockets
URI [3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46829296
jychang wrote 10 hours 45 min ago:
That seems like a nonissue for the purposes of this
discussion though, in terms of user uptake. Tiktok and
Facebook and other websites aren't exactly focused on serving
to people on the same network.
cranberryturkey wrote 15 hours 1 min ago:
URI [1]: http://bittorrented.com
xd1936 wrote 13 hours 57 min ago:
Oh wow
sroerick wrote 15 hours 11 min ago:
This is pretty interesting!
I think serving video is a particularly interesting use of Webtorrent.
I think it would be good if you could add this as a front end to
basically make sites DDOS proof. So you host like a regular site, but
with a JS front end that hosts the site P2P the more traffic there is.
stanac wrote 14 hours 27 min ago:
There is PeerTube for video content.
NewsaHackO wrote 14 hours 31 min ago:
I think it is very difficult (and dangerous to the host) to serve
user-uploaded videos at scale, particularly from a moderation
standpoint. The problem is even worse if everyone is anonymous. There
is a reason YouTube has such a monopoly on personal video hosting.
Maybe developments in AI moderation will make it more palatable in
the future.
t-3 wrote 7 hours 48 min ago:
The "host" is the user in this case. Every user that watches the
video, shares the video. Given that discovery doesn't appear to be
a part of this platform, any links would undoubtedly be shared
"peer-to-peer" as well, so if you aren't looking at illegal things
and don't have friends sending you illegal things to watch, it's
perfectly safe.
lgats wrote 1 hour 59 min ago:
webtorrent!
turtleyacht wrote 27 days ago:
Github:
URI [1]: https://github.com/omodaka9375/peerweb
dang wrote 15 hours 19 min ago:
Thanks! we'll put that link in the toptext.
elbci wrote 27 days ago:
I don't get it, I upload my files to your site, then I send my friends
links to your site? How is this not a single point of failure?
toomuchtodo wrote 15 hours 11 min ago:
IPFS [1] requires a gateway unfortunately (whether remote or running
locally). If you can use content idents that are supported by web
primitives, you get the distributed nature without IPFS scaffolding
required. Content is versioned by hash, although I haven't looked to
see if mutable torrents [2] [3] are used in this implementation.
Searching via distributed hash tables for torrent metadata,
cryptographically signed by the publisher, remains as a requirement
imho.
Bittorrent, in my experience, "just works," whether you're relying on
a torrent server or a magnet link to join a swarm and retrieve data.
So, this is an interesting experiment in the IPFS, torrent, filecoin
distributed content space. [1] [2]
URI [1]: https://ipfs.tech/
URI [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29920271
URI [3]: https://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0046.html
amelius wrote 11 hours 16 min ago:
You don't hear much these days about IPFS, but I can remember one
big problem with it was illegal content and how to deal with it.
dang wrote 15 hours 17 min ago:
[sorry for the weird timestamps - the OP was submitted a while ago
and I just re-upped it.]
logicallee wrote 13 hours 36 min ago:
did the test sites work for you when you tried it? because none
worked for me, and for at least two other commenters here. [1]
URI [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46830158
URI [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46830183
dtj1123 wrote 27 days ago:
This isn't my site, nor do I have any opinions on the implementation
here. I do however find the idea of serving web pages via torrent
interesting.
elbci wrote 26 days ago:
p2p storage as in torrent or IPFS or whatever is the part that we
kinda' solved already. Serving/searching/addressing without the
(centralized) DNS is still missing for a (urgently needed) p2p
censorship resistant internet. Unfortunately this guy just uses
some buzzwords to offer nothing new - why would I share links to
that site instead of sharing torrent magnet links?
recursivegirth wrote 14 hours 19 min ago:
Thinking about this a little bit... could we use a blockchain
ledger as an authoritative source for DNS records?
User's can publish their DNS + pub key to the append-only
blockchain, signed with their private key.
Use a torrent file to connect to an initial tracker to download
the blockchain.
Once the blockchain is downloaded, every computer would have a
full copy of the DNS database and could use that for
discoverability.
I have no experience with blockchains or building trackers, so
maybe this is a dumb idea.
soulofmischief wrote 13 hours 40 min ago:
Look into IPFS and ENS.
theendisney wrote 13 hours 44 min ago:
Its been tried/done but attracted the same audience of
investors looking to make a quick buck as opposed to looking to
actually make it work.
From what i've seen you need some minimum percentage of
makeithappen-ers amoung those interested in a project.
It seems the guy running the extension just left. With minimum
influence on the value. [1]
URI [1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/b-dns/
URI [2]: https://www.coinbase.com/en-nl/price/namecoin
sroerick wrote 15 hours 10 min ago:
This is a great point.
One issue I've had with IPFS is that there's nothing baked into
the protocol to maintain peer health, which really limits the
ability to keep the swarm connected and healthy.
theendisney wrote 13 hours 1 min ago:
I use to add webseeds but clients seem to love just downloading
it from there rather than from my conventional seeding.
Some new ideas are needed in this space.
DIR <- back to front page