Topic: P2P – Ctrl blog

Brave adds support for IPFS distributed P2P websites

2020-12-30T00:39:00Z

The Brave browser recently added support for the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) protocol in its beta release channel (desktop only). IPFS is a peer-to-peer (P2P) protocol that can be used in web browsers to visit websites that are hosted by the website’s visitors instead of a central web server. This is called the distributed web. For the last two decades, the open web has been on a steady course into the hands of a few behemoth multinational companies. The distributed web is a tool that can wrangle back control from the few and hand it back to the many.

What happened to BitTorrent’s Project Maelstrom web browser?

2020-09-23T20:21:00Z

In April 2015, BitTorrent Inc. announced the public beta of Project Maelstrom; its new experimental peer-to-peer web browser. The browser reimagined the web using the company’s name sake file-sharing protocol. Websites would be distributed equally by its visitors instead of being hosted by an expensive central web server. The company published a beta and some blog posts, but then never mentioned Project Maelstrom again. What happened to it?

P2P apps’ connection amnesia makes them less fault-tolerant

2020-05-22T03:49:00Z

Peer-to-peer (P2P) applications discover peer devices either using a centralized tracking server (e.g. Syncthing, Dat, BitTorrent) or a “server-less” distributed hash table (DHT). Server-less solutions like DHT are never truly serverless, though. I’ve previously discussed how DHT clients are overly reliant on centralized bootstrapping/introduction servers and how that acts as a single-point-of-failure.

Four P2P distribution tools for Git repositories compared

2020-05-11T04:58:00Z

Git is a version control system that is decentralized by design. Anyone can run git daemon in a repository to start a Git server. You can also host your repository using a regular web server and HTTP infrastructure. More commonly, though, repositories are distributed through centralized hub services like BitBucket, GitHub, and GitLab. It’s quick, easy, and free to “throw your code up on GitHub” and call it a day. However, there is also a growing number of peer-to-peer (P2P) distributed options to consider as well.

Smarter reusable IPFS chunks from HTML documents

2020-01-19T19:33:00Z

The InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) is a BitTorrent-like protocol for the peer-to-peer distributed web. IPFS splits large files into small chunks. IPFS clients can fetch chunks from anyone on the IPFS network that has that exact same chunk.