And Gnutella, too. I still remember hurrying to download it when it came out because I knew that Justin worked at AOL/TimeWarner and it was going to get taken down on Monday as soon as the powers that be realized someone had written a piracy app. Luckily people had mirrored it, and eventually ended up reverse-engineering the protocol.

is there a link to the blog post? of Justin writing about unnamed exec

The interesting thing is that most of those people weren't actually pals when working on P2P stuff, but they were all working on the same stuff. Zuckerburg and Parker didn't meet until Facebook was growing quickly. Scour/Red Swoosh, to my knowledge, had no major connection with the other projects.

I view it more like an instance of synchronicity, where a lot of bright young people looked at the world independently and decided that this was the space they wanted to be working on. And then when that space didn't pan out they went their separate ways, but the fact that they were bright & energetic meant that the successor projects became huge.

(I wonder if a similar effect explains the General Magic, Paypal, and Justin.TV mafias.)

BitTorrent was also careful to demonstrate that it had substantial non-infringing uses. That's perhaps a lesson to folks who want to challenge the system: seem as innocuous as possible for as long as possible, until you become the system.

Google did this to very good effect: even when I was there the first time (~2010, over a decade after founding) they still had a sterling reputation in the press, while Netscape got crushed by their arrogance (and Microsoft, relatedly) less than 5 years after founding. Microsoft too, for that matter: through the 80s they were seen as an innocuous software publisher, because the hardware was where the money was, and then in the 90s people realized hardware was a commodity and Microsoft was a monopoly.

The IPFS website at the bottom left contains a section "Protocol labs", the "About" link of that links to https://protocol.ai/ which says "We're decentralizing storage with Filecoin".

So their end goal might be making money off that cryptocurrency...

Thanks to the GP for causin me to figure out why the wheel is being re-invented here! :)

:|

via Filecoin: "In short: IPFS addresses and moves content, while Filecoin is an incentive layer to persist data."

https://docs.ipfs.io/concepts/faq/#ipfs-and-filecoin

> scaling poorly

Source?

It's become satisfyingly fast for me over the past years.

> only supporting static documents instead of interactive (tcp) servers.

You can develop dynamic services on Freenet just fine.

It is just done in a different fashion technically:

Instead of hosting the software on a server, and running scripts on the clients' web browser, there is no server/client model. It's true peer-to-peer: Every client is its own server, and the code runs there.

I.e. users install "plugins" for Freenet, and those use the network primitives which Freenet provides to establish dynamic connections and render dynamic content.

So you can have dynamic HTML if you want to. It's just not served by the sites you visit. Instead, things are developed "once and for all" as plugins for all sites and users to use.

So it's kinda like "forced true decentralization". You can't just shove JavaScript down the throat of random visitors of your site. You actually have to go through the effort of making your site's service a real application which people voluntarily choose to run.

>However as they're both communication networks they do not provide censorship-resistance. The endpoints you're connecting to are central servers and can be taken down.

Can you elaborate on this? This reads as essentially false to my understanding. If by endpoints you mean 'relays', those are not 'central servers'. If you mean directory authorities, then yes, those are centralized.

With that said, I'm still not sure what you mean by 'they do not provide censorship-resistance.'

They absolutely have and do provide censorship resistance.

Seems interesting. Wanted to give it a shot but it looks like they had no official docker containers and it wasn't packaged in the fedora repos. I noticed the I2P project does have a docker image and seems to do a similar thing. Do you know what the differences between the projects are?