We're pretty product-focused. We started with Beaker Browser, then recently have been working on CLI tools for private file sharing [1] and now we're working toward an app with the same goal [2]
How is this patreon thing going for you? dat is a pretty neat protocol, but it seems to have trouble coming out of its niche. Are there any products (as in $$$) coming out of the community?
Or maybe some bigger sponsors (think decentralized web)?
We started it this month and are at $150/mo, not a bad start and we appreciate the help. We're trying it as a way to bridge us to the next step.
I love Beaker but I think it was strategically too long-term. The hyp CLI and uplink are us turning our focus to better immediate utility for people, which we think is the right near-term strategy to breaking out of the niche.
I don't think this is doable yet. To effectively do decentralized/p2p web in a mainstream browser, you'd need (some of) the features mentioned here - https://github.com/mozilla/libdweb
How so? As I understand it, WebRTC gives you the ability to do a p2p web, you just need a bootstrap server to load scripts and do STUN. WebTorrent has DHTs working in the browser, not sure how much more decentralized you're talking about.
> WebTorrent has DHTs working in the browser, not sure how much more decentralized you're talking about.
Not sure about how things work now, but IIRC WebTorrent web peers could not connect to native BitTorrent peers. Instead they would connect only to WebTorrent Desktop peers and other Web peers. The WebTorrent team of course is doing incredible work, and they've been able to convince some of the native torrent clients to support Web Torrent - so it kinda works in practice.
So for a new protocol, the hard part would be to make all the non-browser peers speak WebRTC - which is nowhere as easy/robust as writing a TCP/UDP based peer [1].
