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Comment by Dowwie | Hacker News Reader

How about IPFS? OpenBazaar is an IPFS case study. They recently released a revamped v2 built with Go.

Yeah, I'd look at IPFS's networking library, libp2p. It's the peer-to-peer backbone of IPFS and has a big community and active development https://libp2p.io/. It's also implemented in both go and js (as most of IPFS is)

The wire protocol is practically almost not documented.

We moved away from libp2p at the project I work on because of major instability problems in browsers. Our dapp that used libp2p would crash after a few minutes and was generally not easy to use.

EDIT: I'm referring to the JS version here.

Sorry to hear you had move to something else -- my guess is these crashes were from WebRTC, which isn't very performant in browsers yet. Especially with more than a handful of WebRTC connections, we've seen it crash regularly.

We've switched the default browser-to-browser transport in js-libp2p to a websockets relay recently, so you should give it another try.

Did you try to investigate the stack trace or file a bug upstream? No snark intended!

Yes, of course, and it was WebRTC. We ended up with a better solution (encoding the metadata we were storing in IPFS in a bytes32 stored in the Ethereum blockchain).

There were extra scripts and setup. Overall moving off simplified our stack, so it was probably a good move despite libp2p's crashing.

Could be totally fixed by now for all I know.

That said, it was believed that most Protocol Labs resources were/would be devoted to Filecoin, which is probably a safe bet.

We have no intention of letting libp2p stagnate - blog post with announcements coming soon!

That's interesting, I hadn't thought about IPFS - it doesn't really have a strong message passing semantic so much as it has good replication properties, but maybe you could build a distributed log on top of it.

By good "replication properties" you mean "having to run many scripts/nodes yourself" to get widely replicated that is true.

We found IPFS in general to be awesome software that just wasn't quite ready for production.

There's IPFS-cluster[0] but that's still in capital-letters ALPHA.

https://github.com/ipfs/ipfs-cluster

They are working on this: https://github.com/orbitdb/ipfs-log

I'd love to read technical details about what they built with it and how they manage replication. Will look for some and repost if I find.

Look at the IPFS Pubsub and Y.js integration, that e.g. PeerPad uses to build distributed text editing: https://github.com/ipfs-shipyard/peer-pad/blob/master/docs/A...

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