Beaker dev here. Dat is a protocol that can anyone can implement, and Beaker is a tool that implements Dat in the browser. We built Beaker as a demonstration of what becomes possible when you put a peer-to-peer protocol in the browser, with the hope that other browsers will someday follow along in our footsteps.
Beaker dev here, quick question: did you try our beta release? We've done a ton of work in the past few months to make it less opaque and to freshen up our UIs. Would love to hear your thoughts on the beta if you have the time!
> this of course somewhat defies the point of it being p2p
Beaker/Hashbase dev here. Not quite, imo. The key difference is that a service like Hashbase has no special authorship priveleges (unlike Google Docs or Dropbox), and is instead an agnostic peer. We think that's an important distinction.
Hey everyone. I’m part of the Beaker browser team (we use the Dat protocol). As Max’s colleague, it’s been extremely disappointing to learn about his behavior, but I’m proud of how the Dat team/community has stepped up in the last week.
Here’s my statement on the situation and how the Dat community is moving forward:
Hey! I’m one of the creators of Beaker. Beaker is built with Electron, a wrapper around Chromium, and it doesn’t include any UI elements like tabs or the URL bar. We made those ourselves, and have taken inspiration from a number of browsers.
What you see here is actually the “old” version of Beaker - a lot has changed in the upcoming release. Here are a few tweets with screenshots if you want to see a preview:
This makes me sad. I can barely read that new typeface. If I were on the market for a files backup solution, I'd want the product to communicate robustness and reliability. This combination of whimsy and the site simply not working sends a bad signal.
A bit of that, a bit of new people realizing the potential and giving it their best shot. I've spoken to a lot of people who say that Freenet was fun, but just too damn slow to be usable.
That’s something we think about a lot, and decentralization isn’t a silver bullet solution to data loss, but I do think it’s more resilient than what we typically do now.
To counter that, you can take measures to mirror important datasets with a dedicated peer. It requires effort, but it at least makes it much, much harder for example, for a government agency to take down public data without warning.
To draw a quick contrast between Dat and BitTorrent, BitTorrent magnet links are static, meaning if you change the content, you get an entirely new magnet link. Dat archives (a networked directory, essentially) are mutable, so you can publish modifications at a consistent address.
I’m not familiar with DebTorrent, but if you’re interested to learn more about the innards of Dat, this post by pfraze is a good place to start:
I'm one of the creators of the Beaker browser[1] and the reason we use Dat is that as a p2p protocol, it offers a lot of neat properties, including making datasets more resilient. As long as one peer on the network is hosting a dataset, it will be reachable, even if the original author has stopped hosting it.
I won't speak authoritatively on behalf of the Dat team, but I believe one of their goals is to make it difficult for public scientific datasets to be lost, and data living on a centralized server is particularly vulnerable to that.
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