Good to see Dat still alive, but without solve for mobile NAT traversal and persistent seed incentives, these p2p protocols never escape hobbyist tier.
I'm pleased to see DAT survived in some way the niche rivalry with IPFS, but let the people at Iroh their website LLM endpoint is down, https://www.iroh.computer/blog/what-is-derp
> "The DERP Protocol in Iroh"
> "Explain the original DERP protocol by Tailscale, focusing on its functionality and limitations. Discuss how Iroh has adapted and enhanced the DERP protocol, emphasizing the use of DERP URLs instead of regions."
Falling back to DERP relays means trusting and funding centralized relay boxes. That solves connectivity by conceding peer-to-peer. You end up with client-server architecture plus extra cryptographic tax.
nat traversal decentralized/distributed holepunching is absolutely what dat has pioneered and is also industry leading and battle tested because it has plenty of apps with lots of users.
dat exists in rust and the more feature rich mature version is C & JS so you cqn build cross platform p2p apps using the web stack to make it as easy as possible for anyone to adopt
dat is not dead.
dat is alive and kicking.
dat is also has datrs if rust is your cuppa.
dat and its underlying hyper-* stack has industry leading holepunching capabilities INCLUDING on mobile!! ..and you also have bluetooth discovery these days.
its a mature battle tested ecosystem and the keet messenger shows you whats possible.
iroh is just for p2p connectivity and doesnt aim to create what dat is trying - they arent comparable.
in a nutsbell, dat gives you git+torrent but more flexible.
soon datweb will be released to make the stack work in regular browsers - no need for cpoud or any servers - works entirly on just mobile/laptop/desktop
..end user devices
The P2P protocols that actually escape hobbyist tier tend to solve one of two boring problems: NAT traversal, or an incentive to keep serving data when the original publisher is gone. Dat tried to do both with big payloads, which is the hard quadrant.
Nostr is a useful contrast, though it sidesteps more than it solves: relays are intentionally dumb and replaceable stores, identity lives entirely in the keys, and the payloads are small. A dead relay is just a reconnect. That model breaks the moment the interesting payloads get large, at which point you need exactly the durability and seeding incentives Dat never quite cracked. So 'relay mesh + keys' is a great answer for small messages and a non-answer for files.
The persistent complaint about NAT traversal is also worth taking seriously: anything that requires a public reachable peer as a rendezvous point tends to end up depending on a central service, which is why these ecosystems keep re-centralizing around bootstrap nodes.
P2P application layers always sound great on paper until you have to deal with NAT traversal and partition healing in the wild. Interested to see how they handle state sync edge cases.
Good to see Dat still alive, but without solve for mobile NAT traversal and persistent seed incentives, these p2p protocols never escape hobbyist tier.
nat traversal more or less solved:
https://docs.iroh.computer/concepts/nat-traversal
https://www.iroh.computer/blog/what-is-derp
https://ark-builders.medium.com/the-deceptive-complexity-of-...
projects using iroh:
https://github.com/muhamadjawdatsalemalakoum/kith
https://delta.chat/
https://github.com/fishfolk/bones/
I'm pleased to see DAT survived in some way the niche rivalry with IPFS, but let the people at Iroh their website LLM endpoint is down, https://www.iroh.computer/blog/what-is-derp
> "The DERP Protocol in Iroh"
> "Explain the original DERP protocol by Tailscale, focusing on its functionality and limitations. Discuss how Iroh has adapted and enhanced the DERP protocol, emphasizing the use of DERP URLs instead of regions."
and so on for the rest of their FAQ page
PS: Is keet.io a reincarnation of Cabal chat (https://cabal.chat/)?
2 replies →
Falling back to DERP relays means trusting and funding centralized relay boxes. That solves connectivity by conceding peer-to-peer. You end up with client-server architecture plus extra cryptographic tax.
1 reply →
nat traversal decentralized/distributed holepunching is absolutely what dat has pioneered and is also industry leading and battle tested because it has plenty of apps with lots of users.
dat exists in rust and the more feature rich mature version is C & JS so you cqn build cross platform p2p apps using the web stack to make it as easy as possible for anyone to adopt
I think DAT is mostly dead, even the Beaker browser is no longer around I think?
Anyways, new projects like Keet.io keep the p2p dream alive, or at least, give it a zombie-like undead experience.
dat is not dead. dat is alive and kicking. dat is also has datrs if rust is your cuppa. dat and its underlying hyper-* stack has industry leading holepunching capabilities INCLUDING on mobile!! ..and you also have bluetooth discovery these days.
its a mature battle tested ecosystem and the keet messenger shows you whats possible.
iroh is just for p2p connectivity and doesnt aim to create what dat is trying - they arent comparable.
in a nutsbell, dat gives you git+torrent but more flexible.
soon datweb will be released to make the stack work in regular browsers - no need for cpoud or any servers - works entirly on just mobile/laptop/desktop ..end user devices
Another interesting dat-ecosystem project is an open source messenger as potentially an alternative to keet.
https://codeberg.org/LTC-GT/Quibble
The P2P protocols that actually escape hobbyist tier tend to solve one of two boring problems: NAT traversal, or an incentive to keep serving data when the original publisher is gone. Dat tried to do both with big payloads, which is the hard quadrant.
Nostr is a useful contrast, though it sidesteps more than it solves: relays are intentionally dumb and replaceable stores, identity lives entirely in the keys, and the payloads are small. A dead relay is just a reconnect. That model breaks the moment the interesting payloads get large, at which point you need exactly the durability and seeding incentives Dat never quite cracked. So 'relay mesh + keys' is a great answer for small messages and a non-answer for files.
The persistent complaint about NAT traversal is also worth taking seriously: anything that requires a public reachable peer as a rendezvous point tends to end up depending on a central service, which is why these ecosystems keep re-centralizing around bootstrap nodes.
P2P application layers always sound great on paper until you have to deal with NAT traversal and partition healing in the wild. Interested to see how they handle state sync edge cases.