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Comment by janandonly | Hacker News Reader

Limited data plans and connectivity issues make this infeasible. Also security issues on having incoming ports open, of course.

But what if instead of hosting an index.html file over HTTP(S) we could all host via BitTorrent?

A website could be a bunch of files that are referred to by a DHT hash file.

That way everybody who visits the website will also temporarily support the site by hosting it. If your self hosted site is Slashdotted/HNewsed than hosting would still not fail: after all, all the new visitors are temporarily also seeders of the file over BitTorrent.

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there were some projects that explored this actually one which was called chord.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chord_%28peer-to-peer%29?wprov...

You more or less described IPFS. Of course, IPFS grinds my gears because despite oodles of money and time, they still don't have a cohesive ecosystem SDK, haven't rebased on a Rust base, just squandering attention in the space, imo.

I don't see why they'd need to rebuild IPFS in Rust. Go is plenty fast. The problem is that the current IPFS network and design just don't scale very well.

This is correct. Go is more than adequate for this but IPFS has architectural issues.

What does Rust have to do with it?!?

Take a look at Matrix and what the ecosystem is doing. The entire ecosystem is rebasing on the Rust SDK and bindings to it. It's a massive reduction in duplication of effort, and means there's fewer bugs with interoping clients because they're increasingly all using the same SDK.

It's considerably more flexible, more easily embedded than node or Go.

> It's a massive reduction in duplication of effort

Sounds more like a massive duplication-effort to me ...

And yet, it's not the first or last project to choose to build a base SDK in Rust and provide bindings on top. And an effort being taken by a company quickly trying to iterate, build a polished product, and bring revenue in on the edges.

And you can already look at various projects and see the positive impacts.

I'd elaborate on why, but we've all heard it a thousand times and the folks that don't want to believe anything they hear about Rust still won't hear it.

I implemented exactly this in https://github.com/anacrolix/btlink. It works fantastically well. Unfortunately I couldn't get any funding from OTF or similar, and nobody is commercially interested in making websites easy to host and scale.

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