[HN Gopher] Peerweb: Decentralized website hosting via WebTorrent
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Peerweb: Decentralized website hosting via WebTorrent
https://github.com/omodaka9375/peerweb
Author : dtj1123
Score : 97 points
Date : 2026-01-30 20:40 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (peerweb.lol)
(TXT) w3m dump (peerweb.lol)
| elbci wrote:
| I don't get it, I upload my files to your site, then I send my
| friends links to your site? How is this not a single point of
| failure?
| dtj1123 wrote:
| This isn't my site, nor do I have any opinions on the
| implementation here. I do however find the idea of serving web
| pages via torrent interesting.
| elbci wrote:
| p2p storage as in torrent or IPFS or whatever is the part
| that we kinda' solved already. Serving/searching/addressing
| without the (centralized) DNS is still missing for a
| (urgently needed) p2p censorship resistant internet.
| Unfortunately this guy just uses some buzzwords to offer
| nothing new - why would I share links to that site instead of
| sharing torrent magnet links?
| dtj1123 wrote:
| You make a good point.
| sroerick wrote:
| This is a great point.
|
| 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.
| theendisney wrote:
| I use to add webseeds but clients seem to love just
| downloading it from there rather than from my
| conventional seeding.
|
| Some new ideas are needed in this space.
| recursivegirth wrote:
| Thinking about this a little bit... could we use a
| blockchain ledger as an authoritative source for DNS
| records?
|
| 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.
| theendisney wrote:
| Its been tried/done but attracted the same audience of
| investors looking to make a quick buck as opposed to
| looking to actually make it work.
|
| From what i've seen you need some minimum percentage of
| makeithappen-ers amoung those interested in a project.
|
| It seems the guy running the extension just left. With
| minimum influence on the value.
|
| https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/b-dns/
|
| https://www.coinbase.com/en-nl/price/namecoin
| soulofmischief wrote:
| Look into IPFS and ENS.
| dang wrote:
| [sorry for the weird timestamps - the OP was submitted a while
| ago and I just re-upped it.]
| logicallee wrote:
| did the test sites work for you when you tried it? because
| none worked for me, and for at least two other commenters
| here.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46830158
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46830183
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| IPFS [1] requires a gateway unfortunately (whether remote or
| running locally). If you can use content idents that are
| supported by web primitives, you get the distributed nature
| without IPFS scaffolding required. Content is versioned by
| hash, although I haven't looked to see if mutable torrents [2]
| [3] are used in this implementation. Searching via distributed
| hash tables for torrent metadata, cryptographically signed by
| the publisher, remains as a requirement imho.
|
| Bittorrent, in my experience, "just works," whether you're
| relying on a torrent server or a magnet link to join a swarm
| and retrieve data. So, this is an interesting experiment in the
| IPFS, torrent, filecoin distributed content space.
|
| [1] https://ipfs.tech/
|
| [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29920271
|
| [3] https://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0046.html
| turtleyacht wrote:
| Github: https://github.com/omodaka9375/peerweb
| dang wrote:
| Thanks! we'll put that link in the toptext.
| sroerick wrote:
| This is pretty interesting!
|
| I think serving video is a particularly interesting use of
| Webtorrent. I think it would be good if you could add this as a
| front end to basically make sites DDOS proof. So you host like a
| regular site, but with a JS front end that hosts the site P2P the
| more traffic there is.
| NewsaHackO wrote:
| I think it is very difficult (and dangerous to the host) to
| serve user-uploaded videos at scale, particularly from a
| moderation standpoint. The problem is even worse if everyone is
| anonymous. There is a reason YouTube has such a monopoly on
| personal video hosting. Maybe developments in AI moderation
| will make it more palatable in the future.
| stanac wrote:
| There is PeerTube for video content.
| xd1936 wrote:
| Fun! I wish WebTorrent had caught on more. I've always thought it
| had a worthy place in the modern P2P conversation.
|
| In 2020, I messed around with a PoC for what hosting and
| distributing Linux distros could look like using WebTorrent[1].
| The protocol project as a whole has a lovely and brilliant design
| but has stayed mostly stagnant in recent years. There are only a
| couple of WebRTC-enabled torrent trackers that have remained
| active and stable.
|
| 1. https://github.com/leoherzog/LinuxExchange
| cranberryturkey wrote:
| http://bittorrented.com
| xd1936 wrote:
| Oh wow
| r14c wrote:
| I think the issue has generally been that web torrent doesn't
| work enough like the real thing to do its job properly. There
| are huge bit torrent based streaming media networks out there,
| illicit, sure, but its a proven technology. If browsers had
| real torrent clients we would be having a very different
| conversation imo
|
| I don't remember the web torrent issue numbers off the top of
| my head, but there are a number of long standing issues that
| seem blocked on webrtc limitations.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| I think we still have the same blocker as we had back when
| WebTorrent first appeared; browsers cannot be real torrent
| clients and open connections without some initial routing for
| the discovery, and they cannot open bi-directional unordered
| connections between two browsers.
|
| If we could say do peer discovery via Bluetooth, and open
| sockets directly from a browser page, we could in theory have
| local-first websites running in the browser, that does P2P
| connections straight between browsers and computers.
| j45 wrote:
| In its own reimagined way from what's possible in 2026, this
| could kick off a new kind of geocities.
| mcjiggerlog wrote:
| This is cool - I actually worked on something similar way back in
| the day: https://github.com/tom-james-watson/wtp-ext. It avoided
| the need to have any kind of intermediary website entirely.
|
| The cool thing was it worked at the browser level using
| experimental libdweb support, though that has unfortunately since
| been abandoned. You could literally load URLs like
| wtp://tomjwatson.com/blog directly in your browser.
| kamranjon wrote:
| I think one of the values of (what appears to be) AI generated
| projects like this is that they can make me aware of the
| underlying technology that I might not have heard about - for
| example WebTorrent: https://webtorrent.io/faq
|
| Pretty cool! Not sure what this offers over WebTorrent itself,
| but I was happy to learn about its existence.
| BrouteMinou wrote:
| Nice, I clicked on the first demo, and I got stuck at connecting
| with peers.
|
| I like the idea though.
| dana321 wrote:
| None of the demo sites work for me.
|
| Probably needs more testing and debugging.
| dcreater wrote:
| Good, important idea. Unfortunately bad, low effort vibe coded
| execution
| gnarbarian wrote:
| love this. I've been working on something similar for months now
|
| https://metaversejs.github.io/peercompute/
|
| it's a gpgpu decentralized heterogeneous hpc p2p compute platform
| that runs in the browser
| cyrusradfar wrote:
| OT: Can someone vibe-code Geocities back to life?
| ipaddr wrote:
| That would take forever. If you can get the domain I'll hand
| code it in perl.
| awesome_dude wrote:
| <marquee><blink>Neat!!</blink></marquee>
| AreShoesFeet000 wrote:
| give me the tokens.
| 800xl wrote:
| Check out neocities.org
| SLWW wrote:
| I can't imagine that Peerweb has much in the way of stopping
| certain types of material from being uploaded.
| logicallee wrote:
| I tried this, the functional "Functionality test page:" is stuck
| on "Loading peer web site... connecting to peers". I can't load
| any website from this.
|
| https://imgur.com/gallery/loaidng-peerweb-site-uICLGhK
| davidcollantes wrote:
| Yes, none work for me. They either don't have peers, or the few
| ones are on a very slow network.
| journal wrote:
| i wish stuff like this was more like double-click, agree, and
| use. they always make it complicated to where you're spending
| time trying to understand if you should continue to spend more
| time on this.
| dpweb wrote:
| Useless if it takes > 5 sec. to load a page
| rickcarlino wrote:
| Similar project I vibe coded a few weeks ago: "Gnutella/Limewire
| but WebRTC".
|
| https://github.com/RickCarlino/hazelhop
|
| It works, though probably needs some cleanup and security review
| before being used seriously (thus no running public instance).
| Uptrenda wrote:
| I feel like if it were combined with federated caching servers it
| would actually work. Then you would have persistence and the p2p
| part helps take load off popular content. There are now P2P
| databases that seem to operate with this. Combining the best of
| both worlds.
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(page generated 2026-01-30 23:00 UTC)