Peerweb: Decentralized website hosting via WebTorrent
(peerweb.lol)365 points by dtj1123 2 days ago
365 points by dtj1123 2 days 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.
I think we still have the same blocker as we had back when WebTorrent first appeared; browsers cannot be real torrent clients and open connections without some initial routing for the discovery, and they cannot open bi-directional unordered connections between two browsers.
If we could say do peer discovery via Bluetooth, and open sockets directly from a browser page, we could in theory have local-first websites running in the browser, that does P2P connections straight between browsers.
Could you run some kind of hybrid DHT where part of it was Webrtc and part was plain HTTP(S) / WebSocket?
There are some nodes (desktop clients with UPNP, dedicated servers) that can accept browser connections. Those nodes could then help you exchange offers/answers to give you connections with the Webrtc-only ones, and those could facilitate offer/answer exchanges with their peers in turn.
It'd be dog-slow compared to the single-udp-packet-in, single-udp-packet-out philosophy of traditional mainline DHT, but I don't see why the idea couldn't work in principle.
I think a much bigger problem is content discovery and update distribution. You can't really do decentralized search because it'd very quickly get sybil-attacked to death. You'd always need some kind of centralized, trusted content index, but not necessarily one hosted on a centralized server. If you could have a reliable way to go from a pubkey to the latest hash signed by that pubkey in a decentralized way, + E.G. a Sqlite extension to get pages on-demand via WebTorrent, that would get you a long way towards solving the problem.
If a tracker could be connected to via WebRTC and had additional STUN functionality, would that suffice? Are there additional WebRTC limitations?
> they cannot open bi-directional unordered connections between two browsers.
Last I checked, DataChannels were bidirectional
"If browsers had real torrent clients we would be having a very different conversation imo"
The elinks text-only browser has a "real" torrent client
been waiting for this for a while https://github.com/transmission/transmission/issues/47 https://github.com/arvidn/libtorrent/issues/7283
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...
This is cool - I actually worked on something similar way back in the day: 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.
At the time there was a bit of momentum behind the idea of mutable torrents: https://torrentfreak.com/mutable-torrents-proposal-makes-bit...
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
Pretty cool! Not sure what this offers over WebTorrent itself, but I was happy to learn about its existence.
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.
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.
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=1e14b1ba7fcd03e5f165d53ed8...
- Functionality test page: https://gate.distribyted.com/?tid=90c020bd252639622a14895a0f...
Code: https://github.com/distribyted/gate
Caveat: This is a proof of concept, so stability varies and it works best on Chromium-based browsers.
> 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.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_collapse
Ask any modern (post-GPT-2) LLM about a random color/name/city repeatedly a few dozen times, and you'll see it's not that random. You can influence this with a prompt, obviously, but if the prompt stays the same each time, the output is always very similar despite the existence of thousands of valid alternatives. Which is the case for any vibecoded thing that doesn't specify the color palette, in particular.
This effect is largely responsible for slop (as in annoying stereotypes). It's fixable in principle, but there's pretty little research and I don't see big AI shops care enough.
Isn't it mostly ChatGPT that does that?
Grok almost never uses emojis.
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.
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.
The "host" is the user in this case. Every user that watches the video, shares the video. Given that discovery doesn't appear to be a part of this platform, any links would undoubtedly be shared "peer-to-peer" as well, so if you aren't looking at illegal things and don't have friends sending you illegal things to watch, it's perfectly safe.
I like Peertube a lot, and I didn't realize until just now that they had a form of P2P distributed distribution which uses WebRTC. But it would be great to be able to do that with a static site, without deploying a whole framework. Just a simple JS wrapper which could sit on top of a <video> element would be amazing
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.
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=b549f37bb4519d1abd2952483610b8078e6...
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.
Sure, in a sense, but “wiki” actually just means “quick”.
I can't imagine that Peerweb has much in the way of stopping certain types of material from being uploaded.
you can't stop someone from verbally describing certain objectionable material, therefore we should regulate the medium thru which sound travels and suck up all the oxygen on the planet. it's the only way to save the children
love this. I've been working on something similar for months now
https://metaversejs.github.io/peercompute/
it's a gpgpu decentralized heterogeneous hpc p2p compute platform that runs in the browser
reminds me a bit if ZeroNet, which still has a maintained fork somewhere out there https://github.com/zeronet-conservancy/zeronet-conservancy/
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.
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?
Nice, I clicked on the first demo, and I got stuck at connecting with peers.
I like the idea though.
No Javascript
https://github.com/Omodaka9375/peerweb
https://github.com/Omodaka9375/peerweb/releases/expanded_ass...
If the address is a hash perhaps it could contain a public key
Similar project I vibe coded a few weeks ago: "Gnutella/Limewire but WebRTC".
https://github.com/RickCarlino/hazelhop
It works, though probably needs some cleanup and security review before being used seriously (thus no running public instance).
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.
Yes, none work for me. They either don’t have peers, or the few ones are on a very slow network.
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...
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!
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.
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?
did the test sites work for you when you tried it? because none worked for me, and for at least two other commenters here.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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