3 ms·
No need to conflate the frontend (the end-user interface that 'most people' use when trying to 'find the book they're looking for') with the mirroring/archiving
by wgjordan 7y ago
No need to conflate the frontend (the end-user interface that 'most people' use when trying to 'find the book they're looking for') with the mirroring/archiving backend (the distributed/p2p technology used to 'make sure LibGen never goes down').
The frontend would still be a user-friendly HTTP web-application (or collection of several) that pulls (portions of) the archive from the distributed/resilient backend to serve individual files to clients.
The backend can be a relatively obscure, geeky, post-BitTorrent p2p software like IPFS or Dat, as long as those willing to donate bandwidth/storage can run it on their systems. This is a vastly different audience from 'most people'.
The real question is which software's features best fits the backend use-case (efficiently hosting a very large and growing/evolving, IP-infringing dataset). Dat [1] has features to (1) update data and efficiently synchronize changes, and to (2) efficiently provide random-access data from larger datasets. Two quite compelling advancements over BitTorrent for this use-case.
[1] https://docs.datproject.org/docs/faq#how-is-dat-different-than-academic-torrents-or-bittorrent https://docs.datproject.org/docs/faq#how-is-dat-different-th...