Kodsnack 336 - Less like the web and more like Unix, with Paul Frazee

Fredrik talks to Paul Frazee about Beaker browser and making the web more peer-to-peer rather than client-server. Beaker also aims to make it radically easier to create and publish your own content rather Paul explains what Beaker browser is and the technologies it builds on. The central piece of technology is the distributed file system Hyperdrive and the DAT protocol which provides a sort of file- and folder-based API for building applications and handling their data.

Paul discusses the hard problems of Beaker and P2P networks - such as deciding when and how you as a peer start to share something online in the system. Sharing everything all the time does not feel like the right solution to the problem. We also discuss how to think about things more like applications and dynamic web sites in the Beaker way.

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Links

• Paul Frazee
• Beaker browser
• Secure Scuttlebutt
• Electron
• Chromium
• Hyperdrive
• The DAT protocol
• SAAS
• Bittorrent
• Mathias Buus - head of protocol development
• Magnet links
• The discovery swarm
• Distributed hash table
• RSS
• Symlinks
• Unwalled.garden
• Burying the lede
• Peter Wang
• Anaconda
• Tara Vancil
• IPFS
• ICO
• Proof of work
• Proof of stake
• Smart contracts
• Plan 9
• QT compiled to WASM
• QT
• WASM - Webassembly
• Markdown
• Beaker browser on Twitter
• Paul on Twitter
• IRC
• Meetings of the DAT protocol working group happen in #datprotocol on Freenode

Titles

• Trying to move to the next version of the web
• Just a little hobby project
• P2P and web decentralisation
• A peer-to-peer file system
• Bittorrent, but a little bit better
• Bittorrent upgraded
• That was the easy part
• The discovery swarm
• Poor behaviour still gets punished
• Does it get pushed to a wide audience?
• (We are not what I call) topological purists
• Less like the web and more like Unix
• A global file system
• Social design by nature
• A totally client-side architecture
• Inverting the server-client-relationship
• Making the server very dumb
• This giant distributed computer
• Millions of files in a single folder
• navigator.filesystem
• Just a little bit broken
• Not the web browser you know
• /public/friends
• You know that has presentation in there
• The web is somebody else’s computer