4 ms·

Part of the difficulty of bringing this about is making p2p easy for users. I have high hopes that WebRTC data channels can start tearing these walls down by ma

by wwwtyro 13y ago

Part of the difficulty of bringing this about is making p2p easy for users. I have high hopes that WebRTC data channels can start tearing these walls down by making it as simple as opening a web app.

valisystem 13y ago
Not only easy, but also fast and reliable enough to compete with centralized services.
- wwwtyro 13y ago
  Fair point. A significant reason that p2p networks like freenet tend to be slow is because of low adoption - the more users there are, the faster it can be. I submit that making p2p applications easy to use will in turn make them faster than we have seen before, because adoption rates promise to be much higher.
chimeracoder 13y ago
> Part of the difficulty of bringing this about is making p2p easy for users. As a general concept, P2P is easy for users - using bittorrent clients, TPB, etc. is essentially mainstream. The one thing that would be nice is browser support - I would love it if Chrome had the option to download .torrent files using the Chrome download manager. Thanks to web seeds[0], this would allow providers to convert any download to a torrent instead, both increasing use of P2P and decreasing their own server load. Users wouldn't even need to know that they're using Bittorrent to download files - all they'd see are faster download speeds. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent#Web_seeding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent#Web_seeding
- m_mueller 13y ago
  Opera has this since about 8 years. I used Opera heavily back then, but I never felt that this needs to be baked in. Other opera features I miss much more, most importantly free keyboard hotkey programming. I always had y, x, c (without modifier) mapped to back, forward and fast forward.
- wwwtyro 13y ago
  > As a general concept, P2P is easy for users - using bittorrent clients, TPB, etc. is essentially mainstream. I wish that were true, but I am forced to disagree; it's been my experience (and that of my tech-savvy friends with whom I have discussed this UX shortcoming) that most people don't know how to torrent (much less set up and use freenet). Showing my parents or most of my siblings how to use a torrent client in conjunction with a tracker site is not going to be a fruitful task. If it's not as easy as Youtube or Netflix (click and watch), they aren't going to put in the effort to learn or remember how to do it.

by wwwtyro 13y ago

Part of the difficulty of bringing this about is making p2p easy for users. I have high hopes that WebRTC data channels can start tearing these walls down by making it as simple as opening a web app.

valisystem 13y ago

Not only easy, but also fast and reliable enough to compete with centralized services.

wwwtyro 13y ago
Fair point. A significant reason that p2p networks like freenet tend to be slow is because of low adoption - the more users there are, the faster it can be. I submit that making p2p applications easy to use will in turn make them faster than we have seen before, because adoption rates promise to be much higher.

chimeracoder 13y ago

> Part of the difficulty of bringing this about is making p2p easy for users. As a general concept, P2P is easy for users - using bittorrent clients, TPB, etc. is essentially mainstream. The one thing that would be nice is browser support - I would love it if Chrome had the option to download .torrent files using the Chrome download manager. Thanks to web seeds[0], this would allow providers to convert any download to a torrent instead, both increasing use of P2P and decreasing their own server load. Users wouldn't even need to know that they're using Bittorrent to download files - all they'd see are faster download speeds. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent#Web_seeding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent#Web_seeding

m_mueller 13y ago
Opera has this since about 8 years. I used Opera heavily back then, but I never felt that this needs to be baked in. Other opera features I miss much more, most importantly free keyboard hotkey programming. I always had y, x, c (without modifier) mapped to back, forward and fast forward.
wwwtyro 13y ago
> As a general concept, P2P is easy for users - using bittorrent clients, TPB, etc. is essentially mainstream. I wish that were true, but I am forced to disagree; it's been my experience (and that of my tech-savvy friends with whom I have discussed this UX shortcoming) that most people don't know how to torrent (much less set up and use freenet). Showing my parents or most of my siblings how to use a torrent client in conjunction with a tracker site is not going to be a fruitful task. If it's not as easy as Youtube or Netflix (click and watch), they aren't going to put in the effort to learn or remember how to do it.