What does HackerNews think of webtorrent?
⚡️ Streaming torrent client for the web
The projects are open source: https://github.com/webtorrent/webtorrent
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!
Unwittingly, people who put the WebRTC into the browser turned Chrome into world's biggest file sharing network, and now the Genie is out of the bottle.
As well as ability to track things being worked on sorted by priority. I currently do that part in Notion. (https://wiki.nikitavoloboev.xyz/ideas)
Working in public on anything is very useful too as there is a long time inbetween making something and 'truly releasing' something. I remember the talk on how https://github.com/webtorrent/webtorrent started off as a simple readme. Got lots of interest & comments and only then was the idea validated and got built on, already with community.
Here is the great talk about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqnvKP1DYRI
https://github.com/webtorrent/webtorrent
I guess the VM part is just to use a unikernel then try to find a way to auto use vpn.
We need P2P stuff that works.
Like https://github.com/webtorrent/webtorrent and https://github.com/amark/gun
They're both run in production, at scale (millions of users), and do NOT require any tokens.
Regardless of the cause, they've been successful don't they? :)
I think partially it was because you had to download a separate piece of software -a BitTorrent client- to utilise the network. This is also changing thanks to WebTorrent[0] and IPFS.js[1] which works right in our web browsers without even requiring an add-on! They enable initiatives such as PeerTube[2] -a decentralised video-hosting platform- and distributed (NoSQL) databases such as OrbitDB[3].
Convenience is the key and huge advancements have been made in that direction!
[0]: https://github.com/webtorrent/webtorrent
[1]: https://github.com/ipfs/js-ipfs
If you're talking about browsers acting as seed themselves, I don't think that model would get much traction, and the first thing people will do after downloading a browser is to disable that feature.
Nobody wants to keep seeding. This is the #1 problem for BitTorrent, and most people only keep Torrent on while they're downloading, so they never want it running all the time.
I think same goes with IPFS, which is why they came up with FileCoin, but if the mental cost of maintaining a node (because of all the copyright issues mentioned elsewhere on this thread) is higher than the actual profit each node makes, it will never take off. So in the end I think filecoin nodes will centralize just like Bitcoin nodes became centralized--that is, if they ever do end up launching what they promised--and when that happens it's AWS all over again, although the content addressable nature is indeed cool and I can imagine some cool applications coming out of it. It's just that I don't think it will replace HTTP altogether.