andrewosh

Hey all, just letting you know that the core technology inside of Dat/Beaker is alive and well inside Keet [1] (a P2P communications app) and Pear [2] (a platform for building P2P desktop/mobile apps). Keet is built on Pear.

Both projects are built by Holepunch [3], a company we formed a few years back to keep the peer-to-peer candle burning. It's always a challenge but never dull. We're working on tons of mad science [4] all the time, and we're hiring [5]!

(Disclaimer: I work at Holepunch)

[1] https://keet.io/ [2] https://pears.com/ [3] https://holepunch.to/ [4] https://github.com/holepunchto/ [5] https://holepunch.recruitee.com/

Hyperdrive (and the stack it's built on more generally) works great offline. All the drives you own are still editable without the network, and changes will sync when you come online.

As for 'network questionable' and mobile, here are a few of the other projects building on Hypercore that have made those a priority [0] [1] [2].

The Hyperdrive daemon as it's currently built wouldn't fare too well in a bandwidth and/or battery constrained environment (wasn't designed for that), but a mobile solution is definitely on our radar.

[0] https://cabal.chat/

[1] https://www.digital-democracy.org/mapeo/

[2] https://github.com/consento-org/mobile

In the flurry of the launch I got all my links wrong. The HYP repo can be found here: https://github.com/hypercore-protocol/hyp

@pfrazee threw together a demo app called PaulMail [1] that you can view in Beaker [0]. It's very simple and is just a proof-of-concept (messages are unencrypted, for example), but it does hint at possibilities there.

[0] https://beakerbrowser.com

[1] hyper://1bc1faf01a22270fb5698a60e63ef7a596ad976457e6d9914a8fd56d87281917/

Our little team has been doing just this, both for dogfooding and because it works well for us.

Take a look at the "mounts" section of the blog post where we describe a group pattern you can set up. You can create a group directory called "team-drive", then mount each user's drive into the group.

If you're using FUSE, this will feel similar to Dropbox, but with one directory per-user.

We're starting with these kinds of simple mounts, and brainstorming ways to extend them soon.

Thanks Mizza!

Not sure if I'm answering your first point, but Hyperswarm is baked into the Hyperdrive daemon, so daemon users should have their drives swarmed/available automatically. There are a few CLI commands to toggle this behavior too, in case you don't want to add your drive's key to the DHT.

The Hypercore Protocol org's creating a similar proposal repo called HYP [0] (we couldn't resist the name), scoped tightly to the core protocol. We're still solidifying the proposals plan, but yours would add lots of value, so we don't want to lose track of it.

Since your proposal is about peer identifiers, you might like that Hyperswarm uses the Noise protocol [0] to handshake each connection, and the Noise key can be used as a stable peer ID.

As for use-cases, check out Beaker (launched today too). Paul's made a whole bunch of example applications that take advantage of Hyperdrive features, like drive mounts.

I'm personally really interested in using Beaker to make personal document indexers + search (kinda like an amped-up Dropbox), but that's for another post!

[0] https://noiseprotocol.org/

Oops, give it a shot in v12. Think static class properties were added after 10.

Fair enough -- updated it to POSIX-like. The main point there being that it should be as straightforward to use as Node's fs module.

The new version has a totally revamped networking stack that should be a lot faster and more reliable. Part of it includes a new UDP holepunching algorithm that's had a super high success rate for us in practice.

There are some diagrams describing this on the Hypercore Protocol [0] site, and the repo's can be found here.

[0] https://hypercore-protocol.org/#hyperswarm

[1] https://github.com/hyperswarm/hyperswarm