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Actually, I think your argument is almost entirely about P2P tech inspired by BitTorrent. We’ve had good be the enemy of great here. No, no high-traffic sites

Actually, I think your argument is almost entirely about P2P tech inspired by BitTorrent. We’ve had good be the enemy of great here. No, no high-traffic sites actually uses P2P hosting but that doesn’t mean we’re not at a point where they can. In fact, I’d say the biggest impediment to P2P sites in 2026 is the absolute unit that is advertiser data. We have P2P databases, and round trip on the earth is ~300ms (aka “quick propagation” can be seconds which is more that enough for 98%). We have VPS and serverless. We also have content addressing and symmetric cert verification, but when a site’s “traffic” is P2P you lose visibility on most of it. And can you imagine the nonsense of advertisers adding client side tracking data to the public db so that they can query it? Woof.

bawolff 2mo ago
> No, no high-traffic sites actually uses P2P hosting but that doesn’t mean we’re not at a point where they can. Even if true, being the first to do anything is usually an expensive proposition. > We have P2P databases, and round trip on the earth is ~300ms (aka “quick propagation” can be seconds which is more that enough for 98%) I dont know how you are defining "p2p database" or which product you mean, but in general distributed p2p solutions where you do not trust the peers cannot propagate information in a single round-trip, or anything even remotely close to that. > We have VPS and serverless Neither of these are p2p technologies. They are also a terrible fit for something like Wikipedia. > We also have content addressing Sure, but that is like 1% of a solution > symmetric cert verification Do you mean mutual TLS? That is indeed a technology that exists, but i dont know how its relavent. > And can you imagine the nonsense of advertisers adding client side tracking data to the public db so that they can query it? Which kind of brings up the other flaw with p2p - privacy. It obviously depends on what technology is chosen, but p2p often has poor privacy properties. Think media companies sending threatening notices to people who download movies. People often look up private things on Wikipedia. Think sexual health topics. Do we really want malicious people to be able to track that?

bawolff 2mo ago

> No, no high-traffic sites actually uses P2P hosting but that doesn’t mean we’re not at a point where they can. Even if true, being the first to do anything is usually an expensive proposition. > We have P2P databases, and round trip on the earth is ~300ms (aka “quick propagation” can be seconds which is more that enough for 98%) I dont know how you are defining "p2p database" or which product you mean, but in general distributed p2p solutions where you do not trust the peers cannot propagate information in a single round-trip, or anything even remotely close to that. > We have VPS and serverless Neither of these are p2p technologies. They are also a terrible fit for something like Wikipedia. > We also have content addressing Sure, but that is like 1% of a solution > symmetric cert verification Do you mean mutual TLS? That is indeed a technology that exists, but i dont know how its relavent. > And can you imagine the nonsense of advertisers adding client side tracking data to the public db so that they can query it? Which kind of brings up the other flaw with p2p - privacy. It obviously depends on what technology is chosen, but p2p often has poor privacy properties. Think media companies sending threatening notices to people who download movies. People often look up private things on Wikipedia. Think sexual health topics. Do we really want malicious people to be able to track that?