8 ms·

Peerweb: Decentralized website hosting via WebTorrent

377 points by dtj1123 9mo ago

https://github.com/omodaka9375/peerweb https://github.com/omodaka9375/peerweb

elbci 10mo 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?
- dtj1123 10mo 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 10mo 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?
    - dtj1123 10mo ago
      You make a good point.
    - sroerick 9mo 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 9mo 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.
    - recursivegirth 9mo 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.
      - theendisney 9mo 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. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/b-dns/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/b-dns/ https://www.coinbase.com/en-nl/price/namecoin https://www.coinbase.com/en-nl/price/namecoin
      - soulofmischief 9mo ago
        Look into IPFS and ENS.
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
- dang 9mo ago
  [sorry for the weird timestamps - the OP was submitted a while ago and I just re-upped it.]
  - logicallee 9mo 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. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46830158 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46830158 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46830183 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46830183
- toomuchtodo 9mo 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] https://ipfs.tech/ https://ipfs.tech/ [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29920271 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29920271 [3] https://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0046.html https://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0046.html
  - amelius 9mo 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.
    - grumbel 9mo ago
      It's worse than just illegal content. Copyright doesn't allow you to redistribute anything without the permission of the copyright holder. IPFS however has no means to track the author or the license of content. That means even distributing a piece of perfectly legal Open Source becomes illegal. Unlike a tarball or even a torrent where you can bundle content and license, IPFS allows addressing individual files or blocks, thus stripping the license from the content, which most licenses forbid. This does not even require an intentional action on the user, but happens automatically by partial content landing in your cache.
turtleyacht 10mo ago
Github: https://github.com/omodaka9375/peerweb https://github.com/omodaka9375/peerweb
- dang 9mo ago
  Thanks! we'll put that link in the toptext.
ajnavarro 9mo ago
I built something similar a while back: Distribyted Gate: it turns any magnet link into a browsable webpage. The key difference is the approach: it uses a Service Worker as an embedded HTTP server in the browser. This means files are loaded on-demand rather than requiring full downloads upfront. The SW intercepts fetch requests and streams chunks directly from the torrent swarm. Live demos using some PeerWeb demo sites: - Chess: https://gate.distribyted.com/?tid=1e14b1ba7fcd03e5f165d53ed8223a333349db04 https://gate.distribyted.com/?tid=1e14b1ba7fcd03e5f165d53ed8... - Functionality test page: https://gate.distribyted.com/?tid=90c020bd252639622a14895a0fad713b91e0130c https://gate.distribyted.com/?tid=90c020bd252639622a14895a0f... Code: https://github.com/distribyted/gate https://github.com/distribyted/gate Caveat: This is a proof of concept, so stability varies and it works best on Chromium-based browsers.
ethepax 9mo ago
[dead]
Omodaka9375 9mo ago
Hi, Omodaka here thanks for checking out PeerWeb. I forgot to turn the client to serve the demos - should be better now ;) This is meant to work with PeerWeb App which is more secure and stripped down torrent desktop client, that you can use to share your websites and host them through peerweb.lol. Still haven't released the dektop client but might do it. Point of this is for everyone to host their content without needing servers, and as a great learning experience. Security is very big caviat here, so in no way is this final secure version.
Reptur 9mo ago
Heads up: I left a Peerweb link open overnight (~8 hours) hoping it would load. It consumed ~15GB of memory and triggered an OOM kill, crashing the browser. Browser: LibreWolf (latest) OS: Fedora 43
sroerick 9mo 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.
- NewsaHackO 9mo 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.
  - sroerick 9mo ago
    What I'm suggesting is more in the context of self hosting - a JS wrapper which would make it easy to host a video with plain HTML while preventing bandwith issues.
    - zkhrv 9mo ago
      Hey, that's pretty much the project I've been thinking of doing for a while! I really dislike the monopoly YouTube has on online video, but other options or self-hosting can become really expensive due to bandwidth (especially if your video suddenly goes viral). I think P2P (over WebRTC, for browser compatibility) has potential for creating a solution. Roughly: * You have a Website with some <video>s you want to share hosted somewhere—doesn't matter if it's dynamic, static, hosted on a CDN or a VPS, as long as it imports a few scripts and embellishes the <video> tag with a few details. * Base case: you want to publish a video, you host the video. That means you host a server at home that is running the hosting software (maybe WebTorrent based, maybe something custom). As high-speed fiber Internet becomes more common, hosting video from a home network becomes more feasible (unless ISPs decide to cock-block it). * A signaling server establishes a P2P connection (WebRTC datachannels) between a visitor of your Website and your video-hosting home server. * If you have a fast enough Internet connection (100+ Mbps) and low traffic, I don't see why the base case shouldn't work (other than network connectivity problems due to complicated NATs and such). If you have a surge of simultaneous traffic, those that came earlier can offload pressure on the home server by seeding the video chunks they have already downloaded. Theoretically, infinite scalability without bandwidth or hardware bottlenecks (but likely coordination woes in practice). But there's more! Say there's another person on the Web hosting their videos in the same way. If I like their video, I can re-host it on my own home server and let their signaling server know about it. Now there are two "persistent" video servers hosting the video that a visitor can download from. If I trust this person, I can choose to automatically re-host all their past and future videos. Moderation isn't a problem, because you explicitly choose which videos to re-host, or because you re-host (future) videos of people you trust. The more people re-host videos, the better their availability, download speed, and latency if hosts are geographically distributed. Further ideas of pooling signaling servers and home servers into networks to enable other possible niceties (though likely with a more substantial moderation burden) ... I've tried a really basic proof of concept of the base case (across a few countries on a mobile network!), and it worked! Currently, I'm looking to talk with anyone who is interested in any of this :)
xd1936 9mo 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. https://github.com/leoherzog/LinuxExchange https://github.com/leoherzog/LinuxExchange
- cranberryturkey 9mo ago
  http://bittorrented.com http://bittorrented.com
  - xd1936 9mo ago
    Oh wow
  - palata 9mo ago
    I had never heard of this! Pretty cool!
  - FireInsight 9mo ago
    Can't seem to find any mentions of this online from over a week ago, not much commentary either, mostly stuff that smells like advertising / astroturfing. Hmm...
    - cranberryturkey 9mo ago
      huh?
- r14c 9mo 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.
j45 9mo ago
In its own reimagined way from what’s possible in 2026, this could kick off a new kind of geocities.
mcjiggerlog 9mo ago
This is cool - I actually worked on something similar way back in the day: https://github.com/tom-james-watson/wtp-ext https://github.com/tom-james-watson/wtp-ext. 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.
- astrobe_ 9mo ago
  What were your plans for advertising website updates? Classic RSS feed or something else?
  - mcjiggerlog 9mo ago
    At the time there was a bit of momentum behind the idea of mutable torrents: https://torrentfreak.com/mutable-torrents-proposal-makes-bittorrent-resilient-160813/ https://torrentfreak.com/mutable-torrents-proposal-makes-bit...
    - SahAssar 9mo ago
      Did any mainstream client implement this?
      - mcjiggerlog 9mo ago
        Not that I know of, unfortunately.
kamranjon 9mo 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: https://webtorrent.io/faq https://webtorrent.io/faq Pretty cool! Not sure what this offers over WebTorrent itself, but I was happy to learn about its existence.
BrouteMinou 9mo ago
Nice, I clicked on the first demo, and I got stuck at connecting with peers. I like the idea though.
dana321 9mo ago
None of the demo sites work for me. Probably needs more testing and debugging.
dcreater 9mo ago
Good, important idea. Unfortunately bad, low effort vibe coded execution
- j45 9mo ago
  Still a shipped idea, driven by someone. The author has some other interesting ideas.
  - dcreater 9mo ago
    does it matter if it shipped if no one uses it?
gnarbarian 9mo ago
love this. I've been working on something similar for months now https://metaversejs.github.io/peercompute/ https://metaversejs.github.io/peercompute/ it's a gpgpu decentralized heterogeneous hpc p2p compute platform that runs in the browser
cyrusradfar 9mo ago
OT: Can someone vibe-code Geocities back to life?
- ipaddr 9mo ago
  That would take forever. If you can get the domain I'll hand code it in perl.
  - awesome_dude 9mo ago
    <marquee><blink>Neat!!</blink></marquee>
- AreShoesFeet000 9mo ago
  give me the tokens.
- 800xl 9mo ago
  Check out neocities.org
  - cyrusradfar 9mo ago
    you made my life. Thank you life long internet friend.
SLWW 9mo ago
I can't imagine that Peerweb has much in the way of stopping certain types of material from being uploaded.
- estimator7292 9mo ago
  [flagged]
  - ericyd 9mo ago
    This response feels disproportionate to the comment's comment
    - rainonmoon 9mo ago
      And also just… misguided? I don’t particularly think of neo-Nazis when I think of people who advocate against CSAM.
      - SLWW 9mo ago
        We all know that CSAM is one of the first things that gets uploaded to these sorts of platforms. If advocating against CSAM = Fascism then I'll be the first to say that i'm a nazi facist. o7
        rainonmoon 9mo ago
        Yeah, I’m fully in support of a decentralised web but the internet is old enough now that being naive about this stuff has become equivalent to being maliciously incompetent. Without designing for things like community or self-governance and moderation, you’re designing for trouble. Thinking about ways to healthily cultivate a peer-to-peer web doesn’t make someone a Nazi, it makes them a responsible member of a community.
        tombert 9mo ago
        In high school, an acquaintance of mine made the website "e-imagesite.com" [1]. It was a very easy-to-use image uploading site (and honestly less irritating than ImageShack and predated imgur). It was just being hosted on HostGator, I believe, and written in PHP and used jQuery. I believe he had to eventually shut it down because people kept uploading horrifying stuff to it, and it was never even that popular. Child porn and bestiality were constantly being uploaded and I don't think he liked having to constantly report stuff to the FBI. After building a proper comment section for my blog (including tripcodes!), I've thought about making my own "chan" site, since I think that could be fun, but I am completely terrified of people uploading horrible stuff that I would be forced to sift through and moderate pretty frequently. User submissions open up a huge legal can of worms and I am not sure that's a path that I'm willing to commit myself going down. When there's strong anonymity, I suspect that this problem could be even worse. It's a little depressing, because decentralized and distributed computing is one of the most interesting parts of computer science to me, but it feels like whenever I mention anything about it, people immediately assume piracy or illicit material. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20090313063155/http://www.e-imagesite.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20090313063155/http://www.e-imag...
logicallee 9mo 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. https://imgur.com/gallery/loaidng-peerweb-site-uICLGhK https://imgur.com/gallery/loaidng-peerweb-site-uICLGhK
- davidcollantes 9mo ago
  Yes, none work for me. They either don’t have peers, or the few ones are on a very slow network.
journal 9mo 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.
dpweb 9mo ago
Useless if it takes > 5 sec. to load a page
- TuringTest 9mo ago
  You never lived the 90's
  - alfiedotwtf 9mo 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!
rickcarlino 9mo ago
Similar project I vibe coded a few weeks ago: "Gnutella/Limewire but WebRTC". https://github.com/RickCarlino/hazelhop https://github.com/RickCarlino/hazelhop It works, though probably needs some cleanup and security review before being used seriously (thus no running public instance).
Uptrenda 9mo 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.
littlecranky67 9mo 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]: https://peerweb.lol/?orc=b549f37bb4519d1abd2952483610b8078e6e50f0 https://peerweb.lol/?orc=b549f37bb4519d1abd2952483610b8078e6... [1]: https://dynalon.github.io/mdwiki/ https://dynalon.github.io/mdwiki/
- Timwi 9mo ago
  Why is it called MDwiki? It's clearly not a wiki.
  - jmercouris 9mo ago
    Sure, in a sense, but “wiki” actually just means “quick”.
  - littlecranky67 9mo 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.
    - Timwi 9mo ago
      I see. I would personally have counted GitHub as a backend.
fooker 9mo ago
What do you all think of the chances that we have decentralized AI infrastructure like this at some point?
bricss 9mo ago
Somebody has to revive Nullsoft WASTE p2p from 2003 tho
maximgeorge 9mo ago
[dead]
DJBunnies 9mo ago
Every time I try these they never work, including this one. I’m not sure what the value prop is over just using a torrent client? Maybe when they’re less buggy they’ll become a thing.
- Sephr 9mo 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.
  - coxmi 9mo ago
    This sounds really interesting, do you have any more info or a repo to follow?
    - Sephr 9mo ago
      I'll post about the repo and more on my blog once I'm ready.
- bawolff 9mo 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.
- palata 9mo ago
  Well this is supposed to load a website in the browser like a "normal" website (doesn't work for me, stuck on "Connecting to peers..."). Just using a torrent client means that you have to download the website locally with a torrent client, and then open it in your browser. Most people wouldn't do that.
4nonverbal-alit 9mo 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
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- IhateAI 9mo 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.
  - j45 9mo 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 9mo 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.
  - bawolff 9mo 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.
vyr 9mo ago
[dead]
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
wackget 9mo ago
Nice idea. Shame absolutely everything about the website screams AI slop.
1vuio0pswjnm7 9mo ago
No Javascript https://github.com/Omodaka9375/peerweb https://github.com/Omodaka9375/peerweb https://github.com/Omodaka9375/peerweb/releases/expanded_assets/V1.0.0 https://github.com/Omodaka9375/peerweb/releases/expanded_ass... If the address is a hash perhaps it could contain a public key
- Omodaka9375 9mo ago
  Nope just a magnet link
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 9mo ago
  In theory the hash could contain a public key. In practice it does not Design decisions
kruhft 9mo 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
TaoWay 9mo ago
[dead]
bawolff 9mo 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.
likiiio 9mo ago
Can sanitation be disabled? I.e. can this be used to access static websites as-is?
keepamovin 9mo 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.
- Omodaka9375 9mo ago
  Runing dedicated, trusted tracker swarm would do.
als0 9mo ago
Why does every sentence have an emoji?
kkfx 9mo 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...
tiku 9mo ago
Napster.. so what happens if peerweb.lol goes down?
m00dy 9mo ago
connection overhead is way too much for modern world.
palata 9mo ago
I have been intrigued by WebTorrent for a while. From my experience downloading Linux distros over Torrent, I know that it works really well when many people contribute. But I have never had a successful experience with WebTorrent, presumably because it is less popular and I have never found a use-case where enough peers were sharing?
karel-3d 9mo ago
the problem is always updating regularly. I liked BitTorrent Sync, but it was always closed source, and now it's part of something called Resilio.
supernes 9mo ago
Is the tracker down? Can't open the demos...
woctordho 9mo ago
What a pity that although webtorrent support is already merged in the libtorrent master branch years ago, it's not merged into the stable branch yet, therefore not working out of the box in clients like qBittorrent.
- nektro 9mo ago
  this is the real reason it hasnt caught on
- palata 9mo ago
  If it was, would it mean that qBittorrent would share with web clients by default? My understanding was that it's not the same protocol, so I'm guessing that a client like qBittorrent would have to choose to "bridge" between both protocols, right?
khimaros 9mo ago
reminds me a bit if ZeroNet, which still has a maintained fork somewhere out there https://github.com/zeronet-conservancy/zeronet-conservancy/ https://github.com/zeronet-conservancy/zeronet-conservancy/

377 points by dtj1123 9mo ago

https://github.com/omodaka9375/peerweb https://github.com/omodaka9375/peerweb

elbci 10mo 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?

dtj1123 10mo 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 10mo 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?
  - dtj1123 10mo ago
    You make a good point.
  - sroerick 9mo 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 9mo 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.
  - recursivegirth 9mo 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.
    - theendisney 9mo 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. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/b-dns/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/b-dns/ https://www.coinbase.com/en-nl/price/namecoin https://www.coinbase.com/en-nl/price/namecoin
    - soulofmischief 9mo ago
      Look into IPFS and ENS.
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
dang 9mo ago
[sorry for the weird timestamps - the OP was submitted a while ago and I just re-upped it.]
- logicallee 9mo 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. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46830158 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46830158 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46830183 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46830183
toomuchtodo 9mo 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] https://ipfs.tech/ https://ipfs.tech/ [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29920271 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29920271 [3] https://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0046.html https://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0046.html
- amelius 9mo 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.
  - grumbel 9mo ago
    It's worse than just illegal content. Copyright doesn't allow you to redistribute anything without the permission of the copyright holder. IPFS however has no means to track the author or the license of content. That means even distributing a piece of perfectly legal Open Source becomes illegal. Unlike a tarball or even a torrent where you can bundle content and license, IPFS allows addressing individual files or blocks, thus stripping the license from the content, which most licenses forbid. This does not even require an intentional action on the user, but happens automatically by partial content landing in your cache.

turtleyacht 10mo ago

Github: https://github.com/omodaka9375/peerweb https://github.com/omodaka9375/peerweb

dang 9mo ago
Thanks! we'll put that link in the toptext.

ajnavarro 9mo ago

I built something similar a while back: Distribyted Gate: it turns any magnet link into a browsable webpage. The key difference is the approach: it uses a Service Worker as an embedded HTTP server in the browser. This means files are loaded on-demand rather than requiring full downloads upfront. The SW intercepts fetch requests and streams chunks directly from the torrent swarm. Live demos using some PeerWeb demo sites: - Chess: https://gate.distribyted.com/?tid=1e14b1ba7fcd03e5f165d53ed8223a333349db04 https://gate.distribyted.com/?tid=1e14b1ba7fcd03e5f165d53ed8... - Functionality test page: https://gate.distribyted.com/?tid=90c020bd252639622a14895a0fad713b91e0130c https://gate.distribyted.com/?tid=90c020bd252639622a14895a0f... Code: https://github.com/distribyted/gate https://github.com/distribyted/gate Caveat: This is a proof of concept, so stability varies and it works best on Chromium-based browsers.

ethepax 9mo ago

[dead]

Omodaka9375 9mo ago

Hi, Omodaka here thanks for checking out PeerWeb. I forgot to turn the client to serve the demos - should be better now ;) This is meant to work with PeerWeb App which is more secure and stripped down torrent desktop client, that you can use to share your websites and host them through peerweb.lol. Still haven't released the dektop client but might do it. Point of this is for everyone to host their content without needing servers, and as a great learning experience. Security is very big caviat here, so in no way is this final secure version.

Reptur 9mo ago

Heads up: I left a Peerweb link open overnight (~8 hours) hoping it would load. It consumed ~15GB of memory and triggered an OOM kill, crashing the browser. Browser: LibreWolf (latest) OS: Fedora 43

sroerick 9mo 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.

NewsaHackO 9mo 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.
- sroerick 9mo ago
  What I'm suggesting is more in the context of self hosting - a JS wrapper which would make it easy to host a video with plain HTML while preventing bandwith issues.
  - zkhrv 9mo ago
    Hey, that's pretty much the project I've been thinking of doing for a while! I really dislike the monopoly YouTube has on online video, but other options or self-hosting can become really expensive due to bandwidth (especially if your video suddenly goes viral). I think P2P (over WebRTC, for browser compatibility) has potential for creating a solution. Roughly: * You have a Website with some <video>s you want to share hosted somewhere—doesn't matter if it's dynamic, static, hosted on a CDN or a VPS, as long as it imports a few scripts and embellishes the <video> tag with a few details. * Base case: you want to publish a video, you host the video. That means you host a server at home that is running the hosting software (maybe WebTorrent based, maybe something custom). As high-speed fiber Internet becomes more common, hosting video from a home network becomes more feasible (unless ISPs decide to cock-block it). * A signaling server establishes a P2P connection (WebRTC datachannels) between a visitor of your Website and your video-hosting home server. * If you have a fast enough Internet connection (100+ Mbps) and low traffic, I don't see why the base case shouldn't work (other than network connectivity problems due to complicated NATs and such). If you have a surge of simultaneous traffic, those that came earlier can offload pressure on the home server by seeding the video chunks they have already downloaded. Theoretically, infinite scalability without bandwidth or hardware bottlenecks (but likely coordination woes in practice). But there's more! Say there's another person on the Web hosting their videos in the same way. If I like their video, I can re-host it on my own home server and let their signaling server know about it. Now there are two "persistent" video servers hosting the video that a visitor can download from. If I trust this person, I can choose to automatically re-host all their past and future videos. Moderation isn't a problem, because you explicitly choose which videos to re-host, or because you re-host (future) videos of people you trust. The more people re-host videos, the better their availability, download speed, and latency if hosts are geographically distributed. Further ideas of pooling signaling servers and home servers into networks to enable other possible niceties (though likely with a more substantial moderation burden) ... I've tried a really basic proof of concept of the base case (across a few countries on a mobile network!), and it worked! Currently, I'm looking to talk with anyone who is interested in any of this :)

xd1936 9mo 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. https://github.com/leoherzog/LinuxExchange https://github.com/leoherzog/LinuxExchange

cranberryturkey 9mo ago
http://bittorrented.com http://bittorrented.com
- xd1936 9mo ago
  Oh wow
- palata 9mo ago
  I had never heard of this! Pretty cool!
- FireInsight 9mo ago
  Can't seem to find any mentions of this online from over a week ago, not much commentary either, mostly stuff that smells like advertising / astroturfing. Hmm...
  - cranberryturkey 9mo ago
    huh?
r14c 9mo 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.

j45 9mo ago

In its own reimagined way from what’s possible in 2026, this could kick off a new kind of geocities.

mcjiggerlog 9mo ago

This is cool - I actually worked on something similar way back in the day: https://github.com/tom-james-watson/wtp-ext https://github.com/tom-james-watson/wtp-ext. 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.

astrobe_ 9mo ago
What were your plans for advertising website updates? Classic RSS feed or something else?
- mcjiggerlog 9mo ago
  At the time there was a bit of momentum behind the idea of mutable torrents: https://torrentfreak.com/mutable-torrents-proposal-makes-bittorrent-resilient-160813/ https://torrentfreak.com/mutable-torrents-proposal-makes-bit...
  - SahAssar 9mo ago
    Did any mainstream client implement this?
    - mcjiggerlog 9mo ago
      Not that I know of, unfortunately.

kamranjon 9mo 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: https://webtorrent.io/faq https://webtorrent.io/faq Pretty cool! Not sure what this offers over WebTorrent itself, but I was happy to learn about its existence.

BrouteMinou 9mo ago

Nice, I clicked on the first demo, and I got stuck at connecting with peers. I like the idea though.

dana321 9mo ago

None of the demo sites work for me. Probably needs more testing and debugging.

dcreater 9mo ago

Good, important idea. Unfortunately bad, low effort vibe coded execution

j45 9mo ago
Still a shipped idea, driven by someone. The author has some other interesting ideas.
- dcreater 9mo ago
  does it matter if it shipped if no one uses it?

gnarbarian 9mo ago

love this. I've been working on something similar for months now https://metaversejs.github.io/peercompute/ https://metaversejs.github.io/peercompute/ it's a gpgpu decentralized heterogeneous hpc p2p compute platform that runs in the browser

cyrusradfar 9mo ago

OT: Can someone vibe-code Geocities back to life?

ipaddr 9mo ago
That would take forever. If you can get the domain I'll hand code it in perl.
- awesome_dude 9mo ago
  <marquee><blink>Neat!!</blink></marquee>
AreShoesFeet000 9mo ago
give me the tokens.
800xl 9mo ago
Check out neocities.org
- cyrusradfar 9mo ago
  you made my life. Thank you life long internet friend.

SLWW 9mo ago

I can't imagine that Peerweb has much in the way of stopping certain types of material from being uploaded.

estimator7292 9mo ago
[flagged]
- ericyd 9mo ago
  This response feels disproportionate to the comment's comment
  - rainonmoon 9mo ago
    And also just… misguided? I don’t particularly think of neo-Nazis when I think of people who advocate against CSAM.
    - SLWW 9mo ago
      We all know that CSAM is one of the first things that gets uploaded to these sorts of platforms. If advocating against CSAM = Fascism then I'll be the first to say that i'm a nazi facist. o7
      - rainonmoon 9mo ago
        Yeah, I’m fully in support of a decentralised web but the internet is old enough now that being naive about this stuff has become equivalent to being maliciously incompetent. Without designing for things like community or self-governance and moderation, you’re designing for trouble. Thinking about ways to healthily cultivate a peer-to-peer web doesn’t make someone a Nazi, it makes them a responsible member of a community.
      - tombert 9mo ago
        In high school, an acquaintance of mine made the website "e-imagesite.com" [1]. It was a very easy-to-use image uploading site (and honestly less irritating than ImageShack and predated imgur). It was just being hosted on HostGator, I believe, and written in PHP and used jQuery. I believe he had to eventually shut it down because people kept uploading horrifying stuff to it, and it was never even that popular. Child porn and bestiality were constantly being uploaded and I don't think he liked having to constantly report stuff to the FBI. After building a proper comment section for my blog (including tripcodes!), I've thought about making my own "chan" site, since I think that could be fun, but I am completely terrified of people uploading horrible stuff that I would be forced to sift through and moderate pretty frequently. User submissions open up a huge legal can of worms and I am not sure that's a path that I'm willing to commit myself going down. When there's strong anonymity, I suspect that this problem could be even worse. It's a little depressing, because decentralized and distributed computing is one of the most interesting parts of computer science to me, but it feels like whenever I mention anything about it, people immediately assume piracy or illicit material. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20090313063155/http://www.e-imagesite.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20090313063155/http://www.e-imag...

logicallee 9mo 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. https://imgur.com/gallery/loaidng-peerweb-site-uICLGhK https://imgur.com/gallery/loaidng-peerweb-site-uICLGhK

davidcollantes 9mo ago
Yes, none work for me. They either don’t have peers, or the few ones are on a very slow network.

journal 9mo 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.

dpweb 9mo ago

Useless if it takes > 5 sec. to load a page

TuringTest 9mo ago
You never lived the 90's
- alfiedotwtf 9mo 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!

rickcarlino 9mo ago

Similar project I vibe coded a few weeks ago: "Gnutella/Limewire but WebRTC". https://github.com/RickCarlino/hazelhop https://github.com/RickCarlino/hazelhop It works, though probably needs some cleanup and security review before being used seriously (thus no running public instance).

Uptrenda 9mo 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.

littlecranky67 9mo 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]: https://peerweb.lol/?orc=b549f37bb4519d1abd2952483610b8078e6e50f0 https://peerweb.lol/?orc=b549f37bb4519d1abd2952483610b8078e6... [1]: https://dynalon.github.io/mdwiki/ https://dynalon.github.io/mdwiki/

Timwi 9mo ago
Why is it called MDwiki? It's clearly not a wiki.
- jmercouris 9mo ago
  Sure, in a sense, but “wiki” actually just means “quick”.
- littlecranky67 9mo 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.
  - Timwi 9mo ago
    I see. I would personally have counted GitHub as a backend.

fooker 9mo ago

What do you all think of the chances that we have decentralized AI infrastructure like this at some point?

bricss 9mo ago

Somebody has to revive Nullsoft WASTE p2p from 2003 tho

maximgeorge 9mo ago

[dead]

DJBunnies 9mo ago

Every time I try these they never work, including this one. I’m not sure what the value prop is over just using a torrent client? Maybe when they’re less buggy they’ll become a thing.

Sephr 9mo 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.
- coxmi 9mo ago
  This sounds really interesting, do you have any more info or a repo to follow?
  - Sephr 9mo ago
    I'll post about the repo and more on my blog once I'm ready.
bawolff 9mo 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.
palata 9mo ago
Well this is supposed to load a website in the browser like a "normal" website (doesn't work for me, stuck on "Connecting to peers..."). Just using a torrent client means that you have to download the website locally with a torrent client, and then open it in your browser. Most people wouldn't do that.

4nonverbal-alit 9mo 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

deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
IhateAI 9mo 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.
- j45 9mo 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 9mo 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.
- bawolff 9mo 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.

vyr 9mo ago

[dead]

deleted 9mo ago

[deleted]

wackget 9mo ago

Nice idea. Shame absolutely everything about the website screams AI slop.

1vuio0pswjnm7 9mo ago

No Javascript https://github.com/Omodaka9375/peerweb https://github.com/Omodaka9375/peerweb https://github.com/Omodaka9375/peerweb/releases/expanded_assets/V1.0.0 https://github.com/Omodaka9375/peerweb/releases/expanded_ass... If the address is a hash perhaps it could contain a public key

Omodaka9375 9mo ago
Nope just a magnet link
1vuio0pswjnm7 9mo ago
In theory the hash could contain a public key. In practice it does not Design decisions

kruhft 9mo 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

TaoWay 9mo ago

[dead]

bawolff 9mo 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.

likiiio 9mo ago

Can sanitation be disabled? I.e. can this be used to access static websites as-is?

keepamovin 9mo 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.

Omodaka9375 9mo ago
Runing dedicated, trusted tracker swarm would do.

als0 9mo ago

Why does every sentence have an emoji?

kkfx 9mo 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...

tiku 9mo ago

Napster.. so what happens if peerweb.lol goes down?

m00dy 9mo ago

connection overhead is way too much for modern world.

palata 9mo ago

I have been intrigued by WebTorrent for a while. From my experience downloading Linux distros over Torrent, I know that it works really well when many people contribute. But I have never had a successful experience with WebTorrent, presumably because it is less popular and I have never found a use-case where enough peers were sharing?

karel-3d 9mo ago

the problem is always updating regularly. I liked BitTorrent Sync, but it was always closed source, and now it's part of something called Resilio.

supernes 9mo ago

Is the tracker down? Can't open the demos...

woctordho 9mo ago

What a pity that although webtorrent support is already merged in the libtorrent master branch years ago, it's not merged into the stable branch yet, therefore not working out of the box in clients like qBittorrent.

nektro 9mo ago
this is the real reason it hasnt caught on
palata 9mo ago
If it was, would it mean that qBittorrent would share with web clients by default? My understanding was that it's not the same protocol, so I'm guessing that a client like qBittorrent would have to choose to "bridge" between both protocols, right?

khimaros 9mo ago

reminds me a bit if ZeroNet, which still has a maintained fork somewhere out there https://github.com/zeronet-conservancy/zeronet-conservancy/ https://github.com/zeronet-conservancy/zeronet-conservancy/