Learn WebTorrent and WebRTC | Hacker News Reader

Learn WebTorrent and WebRTC

webtorrent.github.io

45 pointsfeross6 comments

I feel like it's a good time for a revival of BitTorrent. There was a lot of excitement for it back in the day, and while it still exists it's definitely waned in popularity.

Trying to do something like share a file with friends on the internet is still really hard to do. I know here are websites for this (like send.firefox.com) but it's still much harder than it should be.

I also worry that Big Tech is slowly trying to kill the URL (and the website in general). The move away from the web toward apps is bad for end users, but good for advertisers and companies trying to extract money from people.

Resilio Sync (formerly BitTorrent Sync) uses a modified BitTorrent codebase to do much of what Firefox Send does, without user accounts or registration or even an email address. It would be nice to build this kind of functionality directly into and around BitTorrent proper. That being said, I use Resilio Sync as a free user on multiple platforms and like the product.

I can't imagine a simpler way to share a file to friends/family vs Send. And I don't mean that facetiously I mean I literally cannot imagine. You open the site on whatever device you are on (no account needed), drag/select the file, and give the link to your friend/family. They don't need a special client or account either they just click the link on whatever device and the file shows up.

The only way to remove any of these steps in any sharing scheme is to preassociate a sharing group permanently which is inherently more complicated for all involved unless you're going for a "stream of shared files" result in which case BitTorrent isn't good either though.

As far as the implementation of the steps it couldn't be any more straightforward/smooth - simple design, not clogged with ads, good contrast, large letters, simple wording, easy to follow UI.

Am I .. missing something? The content seems quite sparse and hacked together. This feels less like a workshop and more of a work in progress.

Yeah you go from, let's make a file sharing site to, real time whiteboard with file sharing support. What? What's even worse is that it's a picture of a YouTube video, but GH pages should be able to render it shouldn't it? Or is that a limitation of GH pages I never noticed till today?

Not a technical limitation. There are privacy considerations to embedding a YouTube video on a web page, and I’m guessing the WebTorrent developers used a static image video thumbnail as a courtesy to their privacy-conscious audience.

EFF has a workaround for the privacy issues with their MyTube script: https://www.eff.org/pages/mytube-limit-privacy-risks-embedde... (it’s jQuery but could probably be implemented vanilla JS at this point)

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