Nostr Web Client

I was looking into pear aka hypercore quite a bit in 2022, a lot more than nostr at the time before getting pulled back here.

Pear was previously named Hypercore Protocol and has been around as a research project for a while, with a relationship to Bittorrent.

It uses the Kademila DHT to discover peers on the internet but requires holepunching.

It is worth looking at the internet archive to see the old diagrams before they modified the website to be what it is now.

https://web.archive.org/web/20220704132854/https://hypercore-protocol.org/protocol/#hyperswarm

As for quality of audio/video over keet, its much better than any other app, and also works over VPN.

A lot of hiccups last year caused keet to break on my network but it seems to have been fixed in the last few months.

The quality of experience still needs work, but I'd not dismiss it entirely and keep an eye on what is happening. There are enthusiasts using it on a regular basis.

Basanta Goswami 1y ago

It was called Dat Protocol once, then they rebranded. Paul Frazee tried building a decentralized social network called CTZN using it but don't think that took off. Paul has also heavily contributed to the SSB ecosystem, and now works at Bluesky if I am not wrong

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wL44nU_eAhM

The better thing to do would be to use a simpler protocol for private sharing of files etc (like the Signal protocol) and announce your preferred servers using nostr. Kinda like how live streams, audio spaces, and git stuff work over nostr

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Discussion

hodlbod 1y ago

The same Dat that Max Ogden started? I always liked that guy.

Basanta Goswami 1y ago

Yes. That same Dat Protocol was renamed to Hypercore and was governed by the Hypercore Protocol Org. Now it's governed by Holepunch, a company that's "backed by" Tether, so it's a subsidiary I guess, just like John Carvalho's Synonym.

Fun fact: John Carvalho's comments on some podcast that they will do a decentralized Twitter alternative some day (probably was thinking of using Hypercore back then) made me realize it's possible, and then I discovered nostr.

rabble 1y ago

Paul is now the lead dev / architect on Bluesky.

ben 1y ago

he also did beaker browser, a p2p web browser built around hypercore/dat.

rabble 1y ago

Yeah I’m a big fan of Paul. It’s nice to see him getting success with his work on Bluesky.

Deleted Account 1y ago

Awe. 🫢 thanks 🙏

armstrys 1y ago

Thanks for connecting all these dots. I hadn’t realized the history of Pear. I did just find this interesting post-mortem from Paul - sounds like the project failures were more around design than around the protocol itself.

https://paulfrazee.medium.com/building-in-the-open-70ac9dccf1aa