alt Hacker NewsPeerweb: Decentralized website hosting via WebTorrent
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Every time I try these they never work, including this one.
I’m not sure what the value prop is over just using a torrent client?
Maybe when they’re less buggy they’ll become a thing.
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.
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.
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...
I wonder if these colors are a kind of a watermark that are hardcoded as system instructions. Almost all slopware made using claude have the same color palette. So much for a random token generator to be this consistent
Nice idea. Shame absolutely everything about the website screams AI slop.
I can't imagine that Peerweb has much in the way of stopping certain types of material from being uploaded.
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.
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
Nice, I clicked on the first demo, and I got stuck at connecting with peers.
I like the idea though.
What do you all think of the chances that we have decentralized AI infrastructure like this at some point?
Somebody has to revive Nullsoft WASTE p2p from 2003 tho
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 wish stuff like this was more like double-click, agree, and use. they always make it complicated to where you're spending time trying to understand if you should continue to spend more time on this.
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.
None of the demo sites work for me.
Probably needs more testing and debugging.
In its own reimagined way from what’s possible in 2026, this could kick off a new kind of geocities.
Good, important idea. Unfortunately bad, low effort vibe coded execution
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.
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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?
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