Comment by xd1936 2 days ago
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.
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
Yes, but it's STUN that sucks. If the software ships with a public (on the internet) relay/STUN server for connecting the two clients, it won't work if either aren't connected to the internet, even though the clients could still be on the same network and reach each other.
"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...
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.