Dat-ecosystem: high level applications built on top of P2P protocols

Good to see Dat still alive, but without solve for mobile NAT traversal and persistent seed incentives, these p2p protocols never escape hobbyist tier.

• fsiefken · 9 hours ago

  nat traversal more or less solved: https://docs.iroh.computer/concepts/nat-traversal https://www.iroh.computer/blog/what-is-derp https://ark-builders.medium.com/the-deceptive-complexity-of-... projects using iroh: https://github.com/muhamadjawdatsalemalakoum/kith https://delta.chat/ https://github.com/fishfolk/bones/

  • prominent660 · 8 hours ago

    I'm pleased to see DAT survived in some way the niche rivalry with IPFS, but let the people at Iroh their website LLM endpoint is down, https://www.iroh.computer/blog/what-is-derp > "The DERP Protocol in Iroh" > "Explain the original DERP protocol by Tailscale, focusing on its functionality and limitations. Discuss how Iroh has adapted and enhanced the DERP protocol, emphasizing the use of DERP URLs instead of regions." and so on for the rest of their FAQ page PS: Is keet.io a reincarnation of Cabal chat ( https://cabal.chat/ )?

    • matheus23 · 7 hours ago

      There's no LLM endpoint :) These prompts were meant for humans to fill in :P (this post was from 2024) That said, this was an old blog post that never actually got finished, so we've taken it offline and replaced it with a redirect to our relay docs page.

    • schmoooo · 7 hours ago

      no. cabal chat is different. ...but you can also checkout quibble as an alternative to keet that is open source. https://codeberg.org/LTC-GT/Quibble i think the most awaited thing that has been in the making for hlf a decade now is "datweb" so all the dat ecoaystem projects might potentially work in browsers as well and not just as standalone apps

  • soltanov · 8 hours ago

    Falling back to DERP relays means trusting and funding centralized relay boxes. That solves connectivity by conceding peer-to-peer. You end up with client-server architecture plus extra cryptographic tax.

    • davexunit · 4 hours ago

      There's a distinction to be made between p2p as a network topology and p2p as a redistribution of power and agency. It's true that relays are an unsatisfying fallback to deal with the networks we have, but they still allow for meaningful p2p in sociopolitical terms. Relays that support the spirit of p2p need to be federated, stateless, and end-to-end encrypted.

      • schmoooo · 1 hour ago

        you dont need relays if you use dat. blind relays are optional and literally only relevant for specific really difficult carrier grade network conditions where direct connections might not always work. ...but even then, relay is really dynamic and any dat peer is automatically and dynamically participating im the process ..p2p, not federated

        • davexunit · 30 minutes ago

          Are you saying that, aside from carrier grade NATs, dat otherwise achieves 100% direct connections?

  • schmoooo · 7 hours ago

    nat traversal decentralized/distributed holepunching is absolutely what dat has pioneered and is also industry leading and battle tested because it has plenty of apps with lots of users. dat exists in rust and the more feature rich mature version is C & JS so you cqn build cross platform p2p apps using the web stack to make it as easy as possible for anyone to adopt

The P2P protocols that actually escape hobbyist tier tend to solve one of two boring problems: NAT traversal, or an incentive to keep serving data when the original publisher is gone. Dat tried to do both with big payloads, which is the hard quadrant. Nostr is a useful contrast, though it sidesteps more than it solves: relays are intentionally dumb and replaceable stores, identity lives entirely in the keys, and the payloads are small. A dead relay is just a reconnect. That model breaks the moment the interesting payloads get large, at which point you need exactly the durability and seeding incentives Dat never quite cracked. So 'relay mesh + keys' is a great answer for small messages and a non-answer for files. The persistent complaint about NAT traversal is also worth taking seriously: anything that requires a public reachable peer as a rendezvous point tends to end up depending on a central service, which is why these ecosystems keep re-centralizing around bootstrap nodes.

• schmoooo · 1 hour ago

  yeah dat or the hyper stack is industry leading in terms of nat traversal - nothing comes close and is also NOT hobnyost at all. nostr is a toy and not even worth mentioning in this context. dat has no repevant central bootstrapping nodes. its dynqmic and every peer becomes one and every app can add dynamically on top of pers constantly collecting and sharing more potential bootstrapping nodes. ... and what i just shared is not just an idea, but a reality in the ecosystem that works try projects like e.g. https://holesail.io for example

P2P application layers always sound great on paper until you have to deal with NAT traversal and partition healing in the wild. Interested to see how they handle state sync edge cases.

• schmoooo · 1 hour ago

  p2p and nat traversal always sounds great - until you try the hyper stack and notice its REAL, battle tested and production ready. try now ... you can either use commabd line tools or peogrammatic libraries but if you dont want to dive that deep, just try something like https://holesail.io first to see that holepunching nat traversing p2p is real and if you find anything that rivals dat - feel free to share, but unlikely judging based on your comment

I think DAT is mostly dead, even the Beaker browser is no longer around I think? Anyways, new projects like Keet.io keep the p2p dream alive, or at least, give it a zombie-like undead experience.

• schmoooo · 7 hours ago

  dat is not dead. dat is alive and kicking. dat is also has datrs if rust is your cuppa. dat and its underlying hyper-* stack has industry leading holepunching capabilities INCLUDING on mobile!! ..and you also have bluetooth discovery these days. its a mature battle tested ecosystem and the keet messenger shows you whats possible. iroh is just for p2p connectivity and doesnt aim to create what dat is trying - they arent comparable. in a nutsbell, dat gives you git+torrent but more flexible. soon datweb will be released to make the stack work in regular browsers - no need for cpoud or any servers - works entirly on just mobile/laptop/desktop ..end user devices

• ch71r22 · 3 hours ago

  Beaker Browser was so cool! Paul Frazee and Tara Vancil. It was always super experimental. I think it ended when Paul left to join other decentralization-focused devs starting to build Bluesky and the AT Protocol. The way I remember it, back then they were building Beaker on dat in collaboration with dat devs, which I think was basically just Mathias Buus (mafintosh) who was part of an org called Hyperdivision. Now Mathias is continuing the dat/hypercore stuff at Holepunch (building Keet and Pears). It still seems cool, but I think a lot of the most exciting stuff in the dat ecosystem stopped when Paul Frazee left So I think that original Beaker/dat/hypercore vision has probably moved mostly into the AT Protocol (Bluesky, tangled, etc.). I haven't been following that as much lately. I wonder if anyone is working on something like Beaker Browser for the AT Protocol, or if that even makes sense

  • schmoooo · 1 hour ago

    yeah, absolutely false. paul pfrazees beaker browser was just one of many dat ecosystem proje ts even though a popular one. keet is also a dat ecosystem project. quibble is just the latest addition and linked elsewhere in this thread and an open source version of keet. there is an active dat rust implementation. you also have a sql relation database primitive on top of dat and the hyper stack now and datweb will be released soon. at proto has nothing to do with p2p at all and its just pfrazee who moved on. the holepunch company mainly focuses on building the closed source keet app and the bare and pear runtime to make it easy to built cross platform p2p application. they also maintain a lot of the underlying hyper stack that has grown and matured and is essentially the foundation of dat ecosystem, but there are many projects. you also have an interview of mathias buus presenting holepunch/keet on the dat ecosystem blog, so sadly your view seems quite distorted for some reason, ...unless you are getting paid to plug at proto

Another interesting dat-ecosystem project is an open source messenger as potentially an alternative to keet. https://codeberg.org/LTC-GT/Quibble