The second coming of the P2P web has begun...
Discussion
What a revolution.
Lol - I didn't realise that Americans pronounce pear as peer.
We pronounce this gritty gross fruit as pair.
Exciting advert.. I guess I'll have to go to the site to find out what it actually is. Any thoughts on how this system could interface with nostr or is it a totally seperate protocol?
It’s an agnostic P2P connection layer, meaning you could run Nostr over pear runtime same as you can over relays. You would just need servers/relays that act as a bridge, broadcasting from one to the other.
Very very cool.
We are entering a renaissance without a doubt.
is it something like keet?
I mean holepunch by keet
Yes, it’s the engine that Keet is built on, and it’s a layer on top of Holepunch.
So basically Holepunch is a whole platform for P2P stuff but it’s complicated to understand. Pear Runtime is an abstraction of that to drastically simplify how to work with it. So much so that it’s cutting an enormous amount of code (maybe half) out of the project we have been working on.
I gotta be honest, I’m very sus for the following reasons:
Their website is a big nothing burger. Looks like something you’d throw together for a college presentation. It has no purpose, no links to any software or anything.
The use of the pear 🍐 imagery is a direct copy of how the folks at Keet use it, and this doesn’t seem to have any connection to the Keet folks, Paolo Arduino, or hole punch, despite seeming to reference the technology.
There is a reference to Keet, Holepunch and tether in the page, must be them.
It’s literally the same guys. Things a Holepunch platform and it’s a release that is alongside Keet. In other words, Keet is built ON Pear Runtime.
Their website is just the announcement page, all of the tools are available on the Holepunch GitHub
🍐
"...where artists connect directly with their audiences, retaining full rights and profits"
So, DRM-crippled and paywalled and/or full of ads? If that's the case, especially the DRM, then no thanks. Copyright and its associated technologies has, in my opinion, caused incredible amounts of harm, and the only way forward without continuing to cause this harm is to abandon it.
In this question, these are my opinions (pretty much copied from the early Pirate Party):
DRM is very wrong. Toxic, dangerous.
Paywalls for data that is free to copy (okay, a fraction of a cent in connection and electricity - that the person copying it pays...) is morally wrong. Probably an unpopular opinion here, but I'm firm in it. (Paywalls for AI computation is a different thing - that's a cost per usage for the provider.)
Paying the artist for a commission work, paying the artist a tip, etcetera, is great, and Bitcoin - especially layers two and up - is great for that.
It will probably not pay as much as paywalls for zero-cost-to-copy data, but that only means that things requiring that in order to be produced, shouldn't have been produced in the first place.
No. It's not like that at all. It's the exact opposite of that.
Thanks for the input, but what does any of that have to do with a P2P technology? If an artist decides to implement some DRM or something, it’s their choice of how to deliver the product. It will succeed or fail based on whether users want to deal with it. There is nothing about Pear Runtime that even slightly suggests the construction you are criticizing here.
I can be someone on the other side of the screenThere are only 5 million and everything would be different
Good. It was just that it was such a strange choice of words in an ad for such a system. Like an ad for organic, grass-fed beef, made with regenerative farming and the only added things are salt and a bunch of high fructose corn syrup...
I don't know more about this technology, where the system's design ends and the users' setup begins in deciding these things, than the video and that you have mentioned it on Bitcoin Audible (which I listened to at work, so it's possible I missed the details if you explained it, if I was doing something that required attention).
Listened to your latest episode today, the one particularly about it. That explained some things, although I'm missing a lot since I'm not a programmer.
Have I understood it correctly that it is some kind of "base-tool" for programmers to include in their programs, a kind of basis for establishing p2p connections that different programs then can use for different purposes?
It’s both a base engine for your app to automatically be able to use P2P connections for its own networking, without needing to deal with any of the P2P complexity. But then also it’s a way to distribute the actual app P2P as well.
So if I build a little app, and run “pear stage [app key]” on my MacBook, then you run “pear run [app key]” on your computer, you can literally live run the app directly off of my machine with no added confusion or GitHub accounts or any crap like that.
Makes me wonder what centralized nodes are required and running to make any initial dht connectivity operational. IPFS was thought to be a system like this but the team maintains server seed nodes needed for any kind of “p2p” operations between arbitrary peers. A real letdown.
There are only DHT peers that get the initial index of the network, but there’s tons of them. It’s literally the exact same as BitTorrent. After you have any touch point to the network you don’t need or connect to anyone by default. You just need initial connections to “open” the network in a sense. Not totally unlike how bitcoin core has a list of beginning nodes to start connecting.m, but they don’t matter in any meaningful sense and you could always change them arbitrarily without losing any functionality or reliability if you wanted.
BitTorrent is indeed the model to follow
#coolness
Seems interesting. Does it automatically download the app in question, and seed (to use torrent terminology, I don't know what it's called here) it to others? In that case, can it be used as a distribution channel also for stand-alone non-internet apps (e.g. single player games), and could such apps then be taken out of it to be distributed by other means, such as a USB memory, if needed?
Basically yes. you can essentially think of it as a live, streaming torrent system. Best way to picture it, imo. In fact Mathias apparently built the streaming functionality into torrents that another team forked and used to make Popcorn Time, which i just learned watching an 8 year old video of his the other day. So that's essentially where this all originated from.
In that case, it seems like it could replace many centralized services, while giving us something technically better, if I understand it correctly. If the people developing such a service keep their hands out of the DRM, user-hostile, side of things, perhaps we could have something similar to a Youtube with automatic youtube-downloader, not as a workaround but as a part of how the system functions. A video "site" without the copyright strikes that has killed a lot of good content on YT. That would be awesome if it catches on.
If you love torrents, you cannot wait for apps on pear runtime 🍐🧡🍐
Guy, can you send me this video …