Hello everyone,
I recently came across an article on TorrentFreak about the BitTorrent protocol and found myself wondering if it has remained relevant in today’s digital landscape. Given the rapid advancements in technology, I was curious to know if BitTorrent has been surpassed by a more efficient protocol, or if it continues to hold its ground (like I2P?).
Thank you for your insights!
That’s just for files though. Imagine a specific decentralised protocol for hosting websites.
You can technically host a website on IPFS but it’s a nightmare and makes updating the website basically impossible 2021 wikipedia IPFS Mirror. A specific protocol would make it far more accessible.
Websites are just files. For something like running a site on ipfs, you’d want to pack everything into a few files, or just one, and serve that. Then you just open that file in the browser, and boom, site.
I’m not really sure it qualifies as a web site any more at that point, but an ipfs site for sure. Ipfs has links, right?
With LibreWeb I tried to go this route, using IPFS protocol. But like I mention above, IPFS is not as decentralized by design as people might think. People still need to download the content first and hosting a node… And then ALSO pin the content… It’s not great. And look-up takes way too long as well with their DHT look-up.
Well… it’s not really designed for that use case, so yeah you’ll have to deal with issues like that. For interplanetary file transfers, that’s acceptable.
I’m searching for better alternatives, ideas are welcome.
Probably the closest thing would be an activitypub blog or static site service.
ActivityPub is still using centralized DNS. I’m talking about a decentralized Web. And no, activitypub doesn’t scale as good.