One issue I've had with IPFS is that there's nothing baked into the protocol to maintain peer health, which really limits the ability to keep the swarm connected and healthy.

User's can publish their DNS + pub key to the append-only blockchain, signed with their private key.

Use a torrent file to connect to an initial tracker to download the blockchain.

Once the blockchain is downloaded, every computer would have a full copy of the DNS database and could use that for discoverability.

I have no experience with blockchains or building trackers, so maybe this is a dumb idea.

That means even distributing a piece of perfectly legal Open Source becomes illegal. Unlike a tarball or even a torrent where you can bundle content and license, IPFS allows addressing individual files or blocks, thus stripping the license from the content, which most licenses forbid. This does not even require an intentional action on the user, but happens automatically by partial content landing in your cache.

I really dislike the monopoly YouTube has on online video, but other options or self-hosting can become really expensive due to bandwidth (especially if your video suddenly goes viral). I think P2P (over WebRTC, for browser compatibility) has potential for creating a solution.

Roughly:

* You have a Website with some <video>s you want to share hosted somewhere—doesn't matter if it's dynamic, static, hosted on a CDN or a VPS, as long as it imports a few scripts and embellishes the <video> tag with a few details.

* Base case: you want to publish a video, you host the video. That means you host a server at home that is running the hosting software (maybe WebTorrent based, maybe something custom). As high-speed fiber Internet becomes more common, hosting video from a home network becomes more feasible (unless ISPs decide to cock-block it).

* A signaling server establishes a P2P connection (WebRTC datachannels) between a visitor of your Website and your video-hosting home server.

* If you have a fast enough Internet connection (100+ Mbps) and low traffic, I don't see why the base case shouldn't work (other than network connectivity problems due to complicated NATs and such). If you have a surge of simultaneous traffic, those that came earlier can offload pressure on the home server by seeding the video chunks they have already downloaded. Theoretically, infinite scalability without bandwidth or hardware bottlenecks (but likely coordination woes in practice).

But there's more!

Say there's another person on the Web hosting their videos in the same way. If I like their video, I can re-host it on my own home server and let their signaling server know about it. Now there are two "persistent" video servers hosting the video that a visitor can download from. If I trust this person, I can choose to automatically re-host all their past and future videos.

Moderation isn't a problem, because you explicitly choose which videos to re-host, or because you re-host (future) videos of people you trust.

The more people re-host videos, the better their availability, download speed, and latency if hosts are geographically distributed.

Further ideas of pooling signaling servers and home servers into networks to enable other possible niceties (though likely with a more substantial moderation burden) ...

I've tried a really basic proof of concept of the base case (across a few countries on a mobile network!), and it worked!

Currently, I'm looking to talk with anyone who is interested in any of this :)

> they cannot open bi-directional unordered connections between two browsers.

Last I checked, DataChannels were bidirectional

There are some nodes (desktop clients with UPNP, dedicated servers) that can accept browser connections. Those nodes could then help you exchange offers/answers to give you connections with the Webrtc-only ones, and those could facilitate offer/answer exchanges with their peers in turn.

It'd be dog-slow compared to the single-udp-packet-in, single-udp-packet-out philosophy of traditional mainline DHT, but I don't see why the idea couldn't work in principle.

I think a much bigger problem is content discovery and update distribution. You can't really do decentralized search because it'd very quickly get sybil-attacked to death. You'd always need some kind of centralized, trusted content index, but not necessarily one hosted on a centralized server. If you could have a reliable way to go from a pubkey to the latest hash signed by that pubkey in a decentralized way, + E.G. a Sqlite extension to get pages on-demand via WebTorrent, that would get you a long way towards solving the problem.

Though the irony of being censored while talking about how CSA should be censored is very funny to me.

These pro-speech absolutists (who are usually libertarian) miss that NAP is clearly violated when any abuse is hosted/disseminated. Additionally while speech should never be censored.. everything must be permissible if all media is speech. You can have a society that censors multi-media but not the caption/description attached; other allowances (for other types of "speech") always leads to the most degenerate of people having a voice while everyone else is punished for calling them out.

The Stripe or Shopify checkout is familiar, but it only became familiar because it was well designed and people wanted to keep using it.

Also when its obvious someone used an LLM, it bleeds into my overall opinion of the product whether the product is good or not. I assume less effort was put into the project, which is probably a fair assumption.