Replying to Avatar hodlbod

Has anyone looked into pear much? Curious about opinions. I'm skimming the docs and getting the same vibe I got from previous P2P things. It's all either made up or I'm too dumb to understand it. I would like to see some kind of network topology diagram or explanation.
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Guy Swann 1y ago

It’s literally built like BitTorrent and it’s over 10 years in the making so it has tons of moving parts. But Pear Runtime is open source and is much easier to build on and obscures away a lot of the hyperbee, hyperswarm, etc stuff.

All the naming stuff is confusing as hell, but it’s slowly coming together in my mind. I think there was just a ton to build to get this to work and they built it in a very modular fashion and their naming convention opted for unique instead of intuitive.

What I can say is it does work. It is P2P. And I think it’s one of the most

Important things being built right now alongside #Bitcoin, #Nostr, and #Ai.

I strongly suggest not dismissing Pear.

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Basanta Goswami 1y ago

I spent 7 months after college in 2021 without a job and learn as much about bitcoin as possible. Also discovered nostr and hypercore at that time.

I understood the entirety of what nostr was back then in 15 minutes. Bitcoin took a few months. I have been working as a dev for 2 years now, still have no clue how any of the things from Holepunch work. It has always stayed in my list of things to learn about, but for some reason, I just can't intuitively understand anything, no matter how much I try.

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Guy Swann 1y ago

It’s stupid hard to intuit what’s going on and I honestly think it’s because they create a new term for everything. It drives me crazy too. The dev I’ve been working with has had the same trouble but we’ve been dryer forcing our way through it 😂

Mafintosh though is basically responsible for the code/system that was built on BitTorrent that enabled Popcorn Time to stream directly from a torrent. And after that he realized he could actually rebuild BitTorrent to be live and dynamic.

Thats what all of this was borne from, and it fucking works.

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Guy Swann 1y ago

That’s supposed to say “brute forcing.” There are no dryers involved in figuring out Holepunch 🤣

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hodlbod 1y ago

Do you have any opinions on how hybrid nostr/pear apps might work? DHTs are ok for indexing, but can't hold all the data. Maybe pear could be used to replicate indexes of the nostr network (i.e. kind 10002 and maybe kind 3's, what purplepag.es currently does). Nostr keypairs could also maybe be used along with that index to bootstrap p2p DM channels. But does pear work offline? IOW, to receive a DM both peers would have to be active I assume. So nostr's relay idea could be used to bridge the temporal gap between peer availability.

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ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 1y ago

this is part of what nostr:npub1t89vhkp66hz54kga4n635jwqdc977uc2crnuyddx7maznwfrpupqwra5h9 's merkle dags could help with, creating high level, divisible units of the branches of related trees

at this point the outbox model (like nostrudel uses) is the best solution - advertise to the network where to contact you and where you send your messages

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Guy Swann 1y ago

The data layer is purely agnostic, meaning everything about #Nostr can work exactly as it is now, but be communicated and connections made via the DHT. (The DHT is solely for peer discovery, same as torrent networks)

The Nostr protocol is actually completely agnostic to the relay system. Relays is just the low hanging, easy method for distributing the data layer. It could run on Pear just as easily (conceptually, obviously implementation would have some hard work behind it), the only caveat being that if you wanted the Pear network and the relay network to be one global community, you specifically need bridge nodes.

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Guy Swann 1y ago

Also just a note; After bootstrapping your peer network a little, you don’t actually have to be online at the same time. Because your peers all have a “blind forwarding” cache of messages that they will pass around until the other user comes online again. So even my one-to-one DMs on Keet or any other Pear app still work fine for small message transfers because *any* of my peers online will hold and forward the message automatically. Kind of incredible how well it works. I haven’t even thought about missed messages for quite some time using the app. After you have even just a couple of peers using it with you, it’s shockingly reliable.

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ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 1y ago

yes, relays are like POP in the sense that they cache messages... teasing out the differences from simple cache to authoritative archive is a separate matter, i'm working on this in my every day, can't stop thinking about it of course - we are turning an altcoin system into the archive... my boss doesn't quite fully get it either, he was talking up the idea of relays broadcasting and i was sitting there quietly thinking to myself (dude, bro, we are selling them the idea of their system being the archive)

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ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 1y ago

this is much as i am pitching and working towards in my own work - nostr is the communication layer for everything

i am doing my best to insert it into an altcoin network as a pubsub for social networking, they seem to be getting it that it's neutral and allows them to deploy stuff with a neutral medium

it's really hard to say what it is explicitly, most normies need some cloak around it to get it, but they all get it when you know what their delusional threat model is

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atyh 1y ago

fair enough, and points taken.