Nostr Web Client

it is easy to think that we are using Bittorrent, since we are using its Mainline DHT, but we are Not.

No p2p storage at all. Just a good old web server, but the censorship resistance come from the fact that you can always point your public key to another hosting provider if you got censored or deplatformed.

In fact, because it is just DNS packets over Mainline, you can use SVCB records to point to mirrors of your data, so even if your main host is taken down, http agents can be smart enough and failover to reading from your configured mirrors.

OriginalSize 1y ago

Very interesting. If not using BitTorrent's DHT what is Melvin's talk about millions of nodes referring to? Webservers? DNS servers?

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Discussion

Nuh 1y ago

These are routing nodes, they have in-memory storage and they only store two things:

1. routing table to nodes closer to a target info hash (basically a hash table automatically sharded)

2. small packets of arbitrary (and other non arbitrary but less relevant to Pkarr) data in an LRU cache.

Nodes churn all the time and even when they don't churn if their cache is full your data might be evicted.

so it is great for censorship resistant routing, not so much for data durability let alone storage of large blobs.

OriginalSize 1y ago

Ok so the DHT is the BitTorrent mainnet but it's only used for small signed DNS packets. What are the chances BT clients filter out these as unwanted traffic?