[HN Gopher] Dat: A P2P hypermedia protocol with public-key-addre...
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Dat: A P2P hypermedia protocol with public-key-addressed file
archives
Author : pcr910303
Score : 63 points
Date : 2020-04-18 18:36 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.datprotocol.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.datprotocol.com)
| dangoor wrote:
| Can Dat really be described as a "new" protocol 3 years in?
| api wrote:
| Yes, as it's still under heavy development and has not yet seen
| heavy usage.
|
| This mentality that things either flip instantly to mass
| adoption or are "old" needs to die. All the easy stuff that can
| be done in 6-12 months has already been done. Anything worth
| doing today is going to take a minimum of 1-2 years of R&D
| unless it's nothing more than a packaging and polish/branding
| of something already in existence.
| dangoor wrote:
| > This mentality that things either flip instantly to mass
| adoption or are "old" needs to die.
|
| That's honestly not where I'm coming from, though. I think
| Dat is a cool project and I've been aware of it from, likely,
| close to the beginning. The scale between "new" and "old" is
| not binary, nor is it necessarily related to "mass adoption".
| There are people who still treat React as though it's "the
| new hotness", despite the fact that it's been out for 6 years
| and is widely adopted.
|
| I'll grant that different people will have different
| thresholds for what they see as "new". I just personally
| think Dat has gone beyond "new" and is in a phase of
| maturation. It's even got a browser with deep support!
| dang wrote:
| We can take 'new' out of the title above, though I'm reminded
| of a second-hand clothing store in my home town which used to
| be called "New 2 You".
| dangoor wrote:
| Yeah, thanks! I'm totally on board with this link being here
| and would love for more people to learn about Dat.
| Already__Taken wrote:
| Wouldn't a protocol like this be a killer feature in the next
| package manager to solve problems npm had? Then you've just got a
| discoverability issue without the whole infrastructure headache
| on top to maintain.
| rzzzt wrote:
| "How Dat Works" linked from the page is still a great
| visualization of all the bits that make up the protocol:
|
| - https://datprotocol.github.io/how-dat-works/
|
| - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20363813
| dang wrote:
| Also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20811936, a related
| project from 2019.
| JakeAl wrote:
| Kind of stagnant, but I liked the IDEA of what was being done
| with the Beaker Browser using the DAT protocol to run a self-
| hosted P2P web. I just wish someone would take the project to
| completion/usability. It would really disrupt things.
| https://beakerbrowser.com
| Taek wrote:
| Skynet is a new protocol that has been working on something
| like this. You can see some of the webapps built on Skynet
| here:
| https://skynethub.io/_B19P18DEI4Y_37wg6yXtfulEq2U8AcIO_lWM7s...
|
| Main project website: https://siasky.net
| koeng wrote:
| Is there anyway to pin skynet files using storage rather than
| Sia, or a way to download skynet files using the command line
| (independent of a curl request from a portal)?
| karissa wrote:
| I don't see a github repository or any link to the open
| source code there. Is it open source?
| soupbowl wrote:
| I found this on their website:
| https://github.com/NebulousLabs/skynet-webportal
| __ka wrote:
| The Cliqz browser implements the Dat protocol. Here's a writeup
| on the implementation:
| https://0x65.dev/blog/2020-03-02/implementing-the-dat-protoc...
|
| Disclosure: I work at Cliqz.
| karissa wrote:
| They are working on a new version, it's almost done. It's going
| to be a lot better!
| https://github.com/beakerbrowser/beaker/pull/1435
| pfraze wrote:
| We decided to take a year to go heads down and rework a lot of
| stuff, so we did get publicly stagnant but we're fulltime on
| the next version and should release a public beta soon. I tweet
| a lot about our progress if you can sort through my sillier
| tweets (@pfrazee).
|
| Past year has had a lot of improvements
|
| - Protocol moved to a hole-punching DHT for peer discovery
| (hyperswarm).
|
| - Protocol now scales # of writes and # of files much better.
| We were able to put a Wikipedia export, which is millions of
| files in 2 flat dirs, into a single "drive" and get good read
| performance. This performance bump came from an indexing
| structure that's built into every log entry (hypertrie).
|
| - Protocol now supports "mounting" which is a way to basically
| symlink drives onto each other. Good composition tool, esp
| useful for mounting deps in a /vendor directory.
|
| - Browser now has a builtin editor that splits the screen for
| live editing. Feels similar to hackmd.
|
| - Browser added a bash-like terminal for working with the
| protocol's filespace. It's glued to the current page so you can
| drive around the web using `cd`.
|
| - Browser added a basic identity system. Every user has a
| profile site that's created automatically and maintains an
| address book of other users.
|
| - We built out application tooling a fair amount. It's fairly
| easy to build multi-user apps now, where previously it was a
| bit of rocket surgery.
|
| Some of the year was spent prototyping ideas and throwing them
| away as well. A bit inefficient, but helped us learn.
| koeng wrote:
| I've been thinking of deploying dat for Nanopore DNA
| sequencing, but recall something about dat not being great at
| handling that kind of data.
|
| Does the newest version of dat handle large files well
| (10gb)? Does it handle tons of files nested in a few
| directories well? Are there any issues I should know about
| there?
|
| What is the command line support like for multi-writer?
|
| Do you have any metrics for how much Dat is currently being
| used?
|
| Thanks!
| pfraze wrote:
| > Does the newest version of dat handle large files well
| (10gb)?
|
| Large files work fine but currently any change to a file
| rewrites it in its entirety. That will mean history will be
| large until the GC kicks in, and any file that's modified
| has to be redownloaded in its entirety.
|
| The team spent a fair amount of time looking at a solution
| to partial file-updates which works like inodes. They
| ultimately decided it was too difficult to pull off for
| now.
|
| > Does it handle tons of files nested in a few directories
| well?
|
| Yep, no issues there
|
| > What is the command line support like for multi-writer?
|
| We're still deciding on how to handle multi-writer. It's a
| priority for us after the upcoming stable release.
|
| > Do you have any metrics for how much Dat is currently
| being used?
|
| Nothing concrete atm. If I had to guess, it'd be no more
| than 1k.
| karissa wrote:
| > Does the newest version of dat handle large files well
| (10gb)?
|
| I'd be curious if anyone wanted to try it ;) https://gith
| ub.com/mafintosh/hyperdrive/blob/master/index.js...
|
| > What is the command line support like for multi-writer?
|
| There is an experimental multiwriter CLI using hyperdrive
| and kappa-db (github.com/kappa-db)
|
| https://cobox.cloud
| grng3r wrote:
| I've been reading about dat and doing some basic projects for
| about a year in my spare time, stagnating a bit lately as am
| finishing my degree. As I remember there was some talk about
| Python and Rust implementations at the time, is that still
| under development as well? I am not as enthusiastic with Js
| but really like the protocol and the idea behind it....
| Thanks
| pfraze wrote:
| Yeah I do know there's a Rust impl that people are working
| on
| anchpop wrote:
| You say you like the idea, do you have a problem with the
| implementation?
| rasengan0 wrote:
| i swung and missed :-(
| https://github.com/datproject/dat/issues/1008
| karissa wrote:
| Here are all the projects that are using components from the dat
| team over the years: https://dat.foundation/explore/projects/
|
| and https://cobox.cloud/
| rapnie wrote:
| Nice. Aral Balkan of small-tech.org is having plans with Dat for
| Tincan and Site.js:
|
| https://small-tech.org/research-and-development/
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(page generated 2020-04-18 23:00 UTC)