Peerweb: Decentralized website hosting via WebTorrent

237 pointsposted 11 hours ago
by dtj1123
(peerweb.lol)

79 Comments

xd1936

11 hours 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.

1. https://github.com/leoherzog/LinuxExchange

r14c

10 hours 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.

embedding-shape

9 hours ago

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.

miki123211

an hour ago

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.

namibj

an hour ago

That was you ask exists; it updates through a version counter. It just works on mainline DHT btw.

Seattle3503

7 hours ago

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

embedding-shape

7 hours ago

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.

jychang

7 hours ago

That seems like a nonissue for the purposes of this discussion though, in terms of user uptake. Tiktok and Facebook and other websites aren't exactly focused on serving to people on the same network.

westurner

3 hours ago

/? STUN: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

There is a Native Sockets spec draft that only Chrome implements;

"Direct Sockets API": https://developer.chrome.com/docs/iwa/direct-sockets :

> The Direct Sockets API addresses this limitation by enabling Isolated Web Apps (IWAs) to establish direct TCP and UDP connections without a relay server. With IWAs, thanks to additional security measures—such as strict Content Security Policy (CSP) and cross-origin isolation— this API can be safely exposed.

Though there's UPNP XML, it lacks auth for port forwarding permissions. There's also IPV6.

Similar: "Breaking the QR Limit: The Discovery of a Serverless WebRTC Protocol – Magarcia" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46829296 re: Quick Share, Wi-Fi Direct, Wi-Fi Aware, BLE Beacons, BSSIDs and the Geolocation API

1vuio0pswjnm7

4 hours ago

"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

bluedino

8 hours ago

Was there ever a web-based Jigdo?

bawolff

an hour ago

> 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.

kamranjon

10 hours ago

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.

DJBunnies

7 hours ago

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.

Sephr

5 hours ago

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.

bawolff

an hour ago

If it actually worked i could certainly see the value prop of not making users download a separate program. Generally downloading a separate program is a pretty big ask.

mcjiggerlog

11 hours ago

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.

astrobe_

4 minutes ago

What were your plans for advertising website updates? Classic RSS feed or something else?

misir

7 hours ago

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

IhateAI

7 hours ago

Yep, and I refuse to use sites that look like this. Lovable built frontend/landing pages have a similar feel. Instant lost of trust and desire to try it out.

bawolff

an hour ago

Its interesting - AI has a certain style. You can see it in pictures and even text content. It does instantly get my guard up.

j45

5 hours ago

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.

IhateAI

4 hours ago

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.

orbital-decay

5 hours ago

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.

karanSF

6 hours ago

Emojis on every line are an AI tell. The times I do use AI (shhhh...) I always remove them and tweak the language a bit.

netule

5 hours ago

Before LLMs became big, I used emojis in my PRs and merge requests for fun and to break up the monotony a bit. Now I avoid them, lest I be accused of being a bot.

rudhdb773b

3 hours ago

Isn't it mostly ChatGPT that does that?

Grok almost never uses emojis.

sroerick

11 hours ago

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.

NewsaHackO

10 hours ago

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.

t-3

4 hours ago

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.

stanac

10 hours ago

There is PeerTube for video content.

littlecranky67

9 hours ago

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...

[1]: https://dynalon.github.io/mdwiki/

Timwi

7 hours ago

Why is it called MDwiki? It's clearly not a wiki.

jmercouris

6 hours ago

Sure, in a sense, but “wiki” actually just means “quick”.

SLWW

10 hours ago

I can't imagine that Peerweb has much in the way of stopping certain types of material from being uploaded.

j45

5 hours ago

Smaller site likely have a smaller footprint

b00ty4breakfast

8 hours ago

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

BrouteMinou

10 hours ago

Nice, I clicked on the first demo, and I got stuck at connecting with peers.

I like the idea though.

kruhft

2 hours ago

This is probably going to be taken down like my site was that used Web Torrent.

dropclickpaste.com is for sale. kruhft.at.gmail.com

fooker

7 hours ago

What do you all think of the chances that we have decentralized AI infrastructure like this at some point?

dpweb

9 hours ago

Useless if it takes > 5 sec. to load a page

TuringTest

8 hours ago

You never lived the 90's

alfiedotwtf

4 hours ago

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!

cyrusradfar

10 hours ago

OT: Can someone vibe-code Geocities back to life?

800xl

10 hours ago

Check out neocities.org

cyrusradfar

8 hours ago

you made my life. Thank you life long internet friend.

ipaddr

10 hours ago

That would take forever. If you can get the domain I'll hand code it in perl.

awesome_dude

9 hours ago

<marquee><blink>Neat!!</blink></marquee>

rickcarlino

9 hours ago

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).

bricss

7 hours ago

Somebody has to revive Nullsoft WASTE p2p from 2003 tho

journal

9 hours ago

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.

dana321

10 hours ago

None of the demo sites work for me.

Probably needs more testing and debugging.

j45

11 hours ago

In its own reimagined way from what’s possible in 2026, this could kick off a new kind of geocities.

dcreater

10 hours ago

Good, important idea. Unfortunately bad, low effort vibe coded execution

j45

5 hours ago

Still a shipped idea, driven by someone. The author has some other interesting ideas.

wackget

4 hours ago

Nice idea. Shame absolutely everything about the website screams AI slop.

Uptrenda

9 hours ago

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.

elbci

a month ago

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?

toomuchtodo

11 hours ago

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.

[1] https://ipfs.tech/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29920271

[3] https://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0046.html

amelius

7 hours ago

You don't hear much these days about IPFS, but I can remember one big problem with it was illegal content and how to deal with it.

dtj1123

a month ago

This isn't my site, nor do I have any opinions on the implementation here. I do however find the idea of serving web pages via torrent interesting.

elbci

a month ago

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?

recursivegirth

10 hours ago

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.

sroerick

11 hours ago

This is a great point.

One issue I've had with IPFS is that there's nothing baked into the protocol to maintain peer health, which really limits the ability to keep the swarm connected and healthy.

theendisney

9 hours ago

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.

dtj1123

24 days ago

You make a good point.