I met Tara once at jsla about a year ago, she was super cool and actually tried to explain this to me briefly. I didn't understand the project until now. The idea has an incredible amount of potential. This just gives any one more freedom in how one wants to experience and publish to the web. It just removes these pesky little boundaries to share. I don't think dedicated servers are going away anytime soon, but this just expands so many possibilities for so many people! Looking forward to see how this grows.
Hey Matthew! We met at the Christmas party right? I'm with you, I don't think servers will ever go away entirely, and I don't necessarily want them to--they'll always be useful for things like indexing, searching, and aggregation :) I'm most interested to explore what happens when we reduce our dependency on servers for things like publishing websites and "social profiles". Could it help give communities authority over their moderation policies? Could it make it easier to customize the functionality of the apps we depend on every day? I want to know, if we were all to publish our own data, how would it change our relationships with twitter, gmail, facebook, etc? Thanks for watching. Hope things are going well!
I think those are important questions to ask especially in our societies that are so connected via the internet. The work you're doing is really impressive and innovative! And yes, that was me at the Christmas party haha. Things are going well over here and I hope all is going well for you too :) Thanks for the reply! I'll definitely be trying out the beaker browser.
Dear Tara, I just paused the video after seeing ur dat website and I am mesmerized, excited and maybe crazy in long term :) I really hope it is online now! I will check soon... As a web developer who has experienced all sorts of headache around web servers, I was occasionally wondering what if we could pass html files directly to each other. But I hadn't thought about peer to peer! And to be honest I still don't know how a p2p network works technically. But I know one thing for sure, there are so many bottlenecks in the way of solo person who wants to make and serve a website or app, and computer tools and science are really overcomplicate d and complexed. Thanks to the TH-cam and people like you who are trying to make learning (like web dev simplified channel) and developing/serving easier for every one, I hope we make a better and more accessible web 🕸️ which is as amazing as it's early days 😊 Thank you
This is interesting, encouraging, easy to understand and a bit of fresh air :) I especially appreciate Tara sharing her background. Sounds like she would have really loved and benefitted from being introduced to more possibilities as a student and is interested in seeing that happen for future young people. That is super neat and worthwhile.
This is so interesting. I wonder how could you use it to host websites that require backend infrastructure, such as php, node, etc... Because one thing is to share the files, and another to share the runtime environment... Is there anything developed in that regard?
Very nice concept but the question is; what's the file size footprint going to be on the p2p devices. I definitely don't want to host truck load of files and how are you managing the private login data? The authentication/authorization and verification without the servers. You can't expect the users all over the internet hold bits and pieces of your private data. Right?
Most of this is getting into implementation, but they are great questions. > What's the file size footprint going to be on the p2p devices? This depends on how you want your application to handle it. It could be as simple as only storing the data that your user wants to see. > How are you managing the private login data? This is actually one of the easier ones. Authentication can be done using a key pair so that you (and everyone else) can prove your identity. > You can't expect the users all over the internet to hold bits and pieces of your data right? With some decent sharding and smart decision making on what to store and when to store it, you can most certainly have a thriving p2p network! ------------------ Further reading: Using key pairs for authentication/identity is a really cool and useful technique! So much so that we'll actually have something very similar soon as a browser api ("Credentials api"). Sharding in large p2p clusters is still very complicated and actively being worked on. If you're interested in learning more, you can look into what the Ethereum team is doing in their attempt to solve this problem at a large scale.
Dat supports sparse replication. This means you can ask the network just for the file you want, at the specific version that you're interested in. No need to store more data other than what you need.
Yeah, they don't want you to learn the configuration of the server, but their project forces you to understand how the server works and how to protect it. :(
Very exciting... I'm curious about 1) How privacy works; if privacy can be employed, will private messages work when a message is only shared between two people and that other person is now offline; 2) how origins work (e.g., if IndexedDB, localStorage, etc., is shared across all sites, and if one can scope things there for privacy too);
I understand that you can make private login to accounts a thing something like an ID(that Key pair that was said in a comment), but what about those 2 cases: - I'm trying to login from a different machine into my account. The ID/Key pair, If I understood it correctly, would be different, so how can I make a secure login system(Even though I've an idea for that, which I use in a project of mine, it still wouldn't be as safe as things are with the current way that web works)? -I've a data base which contains information from all users. How can I safely storage data in it, and allow those I want to to have acess, if its informations are going to be on all devices that acess my website?
This looks like a really cool concept, although it raises some nasty questions about security and privacy which would need to be addressed in some way. Especially being able to produce websites like this which could skim off private details by funnelling someone through your personal, identical looking and functional website which would behave in all of the ways you would expect except it would intercept your credit card information.
Oh, it's real now. Just not nearly as large as the regular web... yet. Super cool and I hope it takes off for them. Everyone reading this should install it and think about what they'd like to use it for. Btw: github.com/beakerbrowser Initial commit 5/25/16 Silicon Valley Season 4: 4/23/17-6/25/17 (which according to Fortune was based on Blockstack) Wired has an article mentioning Storj, IPFS, and Mesh from 6/1/17. Interesting ideas to read about. Beaker won me over with their reference to GoT on their /install page though.
Not so sure about the everyone should install, using electron brings in a couple of security concerns and I can't find anything addressing how they fixed those.
Exciting stuff. Great to see IPFS, DAT etc taking off. See also MaidSafe's SAFE Network and other stuff at the Decentralized Web Summit next week (anyone going?)
Okay but, when the site owner edits the site they own, if it's P2P, it will take a long time to update as you are the only person out of who knows how many with the most recent copy... beyond that, wouldn't this take a lot of space, to share every website you visit? Still an interesting experiment though. I love the idea.
I'm not sure I follow your point about it taking a long time to update. That is already the model in server/client architecture-the server is the only one with the most recent copy. To the question about space, the default setting in Beaker is to only seed data for the sites you are actively visiting. I don't typically have more than a dozen sites open at a given time, so I think it's probably a pretty minimal footprint. I think there will be even smarter optimizations, especially on mobile when we get there, for keeping the storage/bandwidth footprint to a manageable level. Luckily storage and bandwidth for fixed/desktop devices is only getting cheaper, but as soon as we start to move into mobile, both get a lot more precious!
If you launch a site, and before someone else visits it (and becomes a p2p host) you turn your computer off, or it dies, is your site offline for everyone until your turn your computer back on?
(sorry i'm late u.u) yes, but you can ask a friend to host it for you and/or use a public server seeder pinner thing like hashbase (this does not defeat the point of decentralizing, since even if hashbase goes down the site will still exist)
If you install Beaker browser, then go look at Apps, there is a Fritter app (Twitter like posting) and a Cabal Chat app, along with links to their git repositories
Looks good. I am generally not a fan of cryptocurrencies, but I think in this case it would be a good idea to combine it with one. So you can have a network of well connected and fast servers that cache the pages.
IPFS is incorporating Ethereum contracts and Filecoin as a way to incentivize data storage services. I can image this being an evolutionary step for Beaker as well.
I dont really get what is the point of doing this. If someone can write html they will surely know how to simply upload it to Netlify or Gihubpages. And blockchain already adrdessed disturbed hosting already. I dont get the point.
neocities and glitch and github pages will be discontinued eventually, just like how geocities has been (plus out of these three only glitch lets you do stuff other than static html files) blockchain does kinda work but in my opinion it's not very well fit for the task: every node would have to store every single website forever (with beaker you only keep the stuff you're interested in), and mining is hard to get into (afaik you need to either waste gigawatts of electricity trying to get lucky, or already have some money for proof of stake) so it's not very decentralized in my opinion though this is a tiny bit like blockchain too, but everyone has their own and only they can write to it
blockchain being p2p is a side thought and it is the only good thing about it; there are tons of better p2p protocols that are MEANT for shared access (bittorrent for example), blockchain is grossly inefficient for most tasks just because of its design
![โรงเรียนห้ามรัก โดนจับได้ตาย...!! [เอิร์นไดเม่]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/4u02Sbr556Q/mqdefault.jpg)
I met Tara once at jsla about a year ago, she was super cool and actually tried to explain this to me briefly. I didn't understand the project until now. The idea has an incredible amount of potential. This just gives any one more freedom in how one wants to experience and publish to the web. It just removes these pesky little boundaries to share. I don't think dedicated servers are going away anytime soon, but this just expands so many possibilities for so many people! Looking forward to see how this grows.
Hey Matthew! We met at the Christmas party right? I'm with you, I don't think servers will ever go away entirely, and I don't necessarily want them to--they'll always be useful for things like indexing, searching, and aggregation :)
I'm most interested to explore what happens when we reduce our dependency on servers for things like publishing websites and "social profiles". Could it help give communities authority over their moderation policies? Could it make it easier to customize the functionality of the apps we depend on every day? I want to know, if we were all to publish our own data, how would it change our relationships with twitter, gmail, facebook, etc?
Thanks for watching. Hope things are going well!
I think those are important questions to ask especially in our societies that are so connected via the internet. The work you're doing is really impressive and innovative! And yes, that was me at the Christmas party haha. Things are going well over here and I hope all is going well for you too :) Thanks for the reply! I'll definitely be trying out the beaker browser.
Dear Tara,
I just paused the video after seeing ur dat website and I am mesmerized, excited and maybe crazy in long term :) I really hope it is online now! I will check soon...
As a web developer who has experienced all sorts of headache around web servers, I was occasionally wondering what if we could pass html files directly to each other. But I hadn't thought about peer to peer! And to be honest I still don't know how a p2p network works technically.
But I know one thing for sure, there are so many bottlenecks in the way of solo person who wants to make and serve a website or app, and computer tools and science are really overcomplicate d and complexed.
Thanks to the TH-cam and people like you who are trying to make learning (like web dev simplified channel) and developing/serving easier for every one, I hope we make a better and more accessible web 🕸️ which is as amazing as it's early days 😊
Thank you
This is interesting, encouraging, easy to understand and a bit of fresh air :) I especially appreciate Tara sharing her background. Sounds like she would have really loved and benefitted from being introduced to more possibilities as a student and is interested in seeing that happen for future young people. That is super neat and worthwhile.
All devices together can be the most powerful server ever built
Very cool. I like the concept and hope it is adopted.
wow this is an amazing talk and project!
This is so interesting. I wonder how could you use it to host websites that require backend infrastructure, such as php, node, etc... Because one thing is to share the files, and another to share the runtime environment... Is there anything developed in that regard?
Loved the talk. Very interesting concept. Great job!
This is realy interesting and fascinating. Great talk😍
Very nice concept but the question is; what's the file size footprint going to be on the p2p devices. I definitely don't want to host truck load of files and how are you managing the private login data? The authentication/authorization and verification without the servers. You can't expect the users all over the internet hold bits and pieces of your private data. Right?
Most of this is getting into implementation, but they are great questions.
> What's the file size footprint going to be on the p2p devices?
This depends on how you want your application to handle it. It could be as simple as only storing the data that your user wants to see.
> How are you managing the private login data?
This is actually one of the easier ones. Authentication can be done using a key pair so that you (and everyone else) can prove your identity.
> You can't expect the users all over the internet to hold bits and pieces of your data right?
With some decent sharding and smart decision making on what to store and when to store it, you can most certainly have a thriving p2p network!
------------------
Further reading:
Using key pairs for authentication/identity is a really cool and useful technique! So much so that we'll actually have something very similar soon as a browser api ("Credentials api").
Sharding in large p2p clusters is still very complicated and actively being worked on. If you're interested in learning more, you can look into what the Ethereum team is doing in their attempt to solve this problem at a large scale.
Dat supports sparse replication. This means you can ask the network just for the file you want, at the specific version that you're interested in. No need to store more data other than what you need.
Yeah, they don't want you to learn the configuration of the server, but their project forces you to understand how the server works and how to protect it. :(
Very exciting... I'm curious about 1) How privacy works; if privacy can be employed, will private messages work when a message is only shared between two people and that other person is now offline; 2) how origins work (e.g., if IndexedDB, localStorage, etc., is shared across all sites, and if one can scope things there for privacy too);
I understand that you can make private login to accounts a thing something like an ID(that Key pair that was said in a comment), but what about those 2 cases:
- I'm trying to login from a different machine into my account. The ID/Key pair, If I understood it correctly, would be different, so how can I make a secure login system(Even though I've an idea for that, which I use in a project of mine, it still wouldn't be as safe as things are with the current way that web works)?
-I've a data base which contains information from all users. How can I safely storage data in it, and allow those I want to to have acess, if its informations are going to be on all devices that acess my website?
This looks like a really cool concept, although it raises some nasty questions about security and privacy which would need to be addressed in some way. Especially being able to produce websites like this which could skim off private details by funnelling someone through your personal, identical looking and functional website which would behave in all of the ways you would expect except it would intercept your credit card information.
I've mixed reaction about this. Two things I can say, either it is a bad idea or it is too ahead of its time!
its amazing. great work. great concept.
cool... looks like piedpiper new internet
exactly I was gonna say the same this is exactly the same thing but will be great if it becomes real.
Oh, it's real now. Just not nearly as large as the regular web... yet. Super cool and I hope it takes off for them. Everyone reading this should install it and think about what they'd like to use it for.
Btw:
github.com/beakerbrowser Initial commit 5/25/16
Silicon Valley Season 4: 4/23/17-6/25/17
(which according to Fortune was based on Blockstack)
Wired has an article mentioning Storj, IPFS, and Mesh from 6/1/17. Interesting ideas to read about.
Beaker won me over with their reference to GoT on their /install page though.
Not so sure about the everyone should install, using electron brings in a couple of security concerns and I can't find anything addressing how they fixed those.
This looks incredibly promising.
Exciting stuff. Great to see IPFS, DAT etc taking off. See also MaidSafe's SAFE Network and other stuff at the Decentralized Web Summit next week (anyone going?)
The Beaker team will be there :)
you are great Tara! kudos!!
Okay but, when the site owner edits the site they own, if it's P2P, it will take a long time to update as you are the only person out of who knows how many with the most recent copy... beyond that, wouldn't this take a lot of space, to share every website you visit?
Still an interesting experiment though. I love the idea.
I'm not sure I follow your point about it taking a long time to update. That is already the model in server/client architecture-the server is the only one with the most recent copy.
To the question about space, the default setting in Beaker is to only seed data for the sites you are actively visiting. I don't typically have more than a dozen sites open at a given time, so I think it's probably a pretty minimal footprint. I think there will be even smarter optimizations, especially on mobile when we get there, for keeping the storage/bandwidth footprint to a manageable level. Luckily storage and bandwidth for fixed/desktop devices is only getting cheaper, but as soon as we start to move into mobile, both get a lot more precious!
Updates are published and synced quite quickly! When I publish a change to my website, other peers usually sync up with in a few seconds.
Very nice. Digging into the details
amazing Idea! I have a thing for retro design and I think this can totally rock it!
great talk
That's genuinely great, I've always wanted something like this, I didn't think of building a custom browser, though 😂
Can someone explain to me where it would make sense to use p2p web, compared to conventional server-client model?
Can you think of a case where it wouldn't make sense to use p2p?
If you launch a site, and before someone else visits it (and becomes a p2p host) you turn your computer off, or it dies, is your site offline for everyone until your turn your computer back on?
(sorry i'm late u.u)
yes, but you can ask a friend to host it for you and/or use a public server seeder pinner thing like hashbase (this does not defeat the point of decentralizing, since even if hashbase goes down the site will still exist)
For sure this tool is also nice for iot right now
lets make a global network of fridges! (just joking)
the new Tor
This is so cool!
This is so cool.
How secure is dat compared to https? Is everything sent in the clear or is it encrypted?
Here is dat definition datproject.org/ and a PDF on dat protocol github.com/datprotocol/whitepaper/raw/master/dat-paper.pdf
interesting concept.
The world wide server companies are gonna hunt you down 🤪
How would you implement websocket connections between users (like chats for instance) using this protocol?
If you install Beaker browser, then go look at Apps, there is a Fritter app (Twitter like posting) and a Cabal Chat app, along with links to their git repositories
you don't need websockets. p2p protocols are much more powerful than websockets.
Great great idea. I'm afraid it will take time. Maybe if Google adopt it
Looks good. I am generally not a fan of cryptocurrencies, but I think in this case it would be a good idea to combine it with one. So you can have a network of well connected and fast servers that cache the pages.
IPFS is incorporating Ethereum contracts and Filecoin as a way to incentivize data storage services. I can image this being an evolutionary step for Beaker as well.
Cool, if you add something like meta mask, we can create a full Dapp
Pipernet Exists
I dont really get what is the point of doing this. If someone can write html they will surely know how to simply upload it to Netlify or Gihubpages. And blockchain already adrdessed disturbed hosting already. I dont get the point.
neocities and glitch and github pages will be discontinued eventually, just like how geocities has been (plus out of these three only glitch lets you do stuff other than static html files)
blockchain does kinda work but in my opinion it's not very well fit for the task: every node would have to store every single website forever (with beaker you only keep the stuff you're interested in), and mining is hard to get into (afaik you need to either waste gigawatts of electricity trying to get lucky, or already have some money for proof of stake) so it's not very decentralized in my opinion
though this is a tiny bit like blockchain too, but everyone has their own and only they can write to it
blockchain being p2p is a side thought and it is the only good thing about it; there are tons of better p2p protocols that are MEANT for shared access (bittorrent for example), blockchain is grossly inefficient for most tasks just because of its design
Just like bitcoin, but for the web
I had to learn servers too.. And server sucks!!
interesting concept.