Comment on Plebbit Will Never Deliver, Apologies for the Hype, Lemmy's Where I’m Staying
rinse@lemmy.world 21 hours agoI’m not familiar with Plebbit, but it seems to me they’re trying to establish a cryptographically verifiable distributed ledger - a distributed blockchain. There’s no proof-of-work in this, because the blocks are content, so the energy cost people associate with bitcoin is missing.
Plebbit is not a ledger, it’s a P2P protocol and has no DHT. Peers find each other by coordinating over HTTP routers, which are similar to bittorrent trackers. HTTP routers are essentially key-value stores so they’re very easy to deploy.
sxan@midwest.social 21 hours ago
This is similar to Jami. Jami has http name servers for lookup, and (optional) http DHT proxy servers for NAT traversal. Beyond that, it’s peer-to-peer DHT. The DHT isn’t global, it’s shared between connected clients. DHT are also key-value stores, and Jami’s issues are not with the name server, they’re with message synchronization between clients.
Actually, I have to qualify that I don’t know what causes Jami’s delivery issues, but it’s probably not the name servers or proxies, because you can (and I have) hit them directly with a web browser or curl. From what I can tell, the Jami developers don’t acknowledge issues or are incapable of or unwilling to track them down, but the point is that it’s very likely the P2P part that is giving them trouble.
P2P is Ia hard problem to solve when the peers come and go online; peers may not be online at the same times and there’s no central mailbox to query for missed Messages; peers are mobile devices that change IPs frequently; or peers are behind a NAT.
You may be right about the design; I scanned the design summary, and easily could have misunderstood it. I don’t think it affects the difficulty of building robust, reliable P2P applications.
rinse@lemmy.world 21 hours ago
A global DHT unfortuantely is extremely resource intensive, and part of our design requirements is full p2p capabilities for both mobile and web browsers. This cannot be achieve with a DHT, although if a DHT design emerges with support for both, we will consider using it.
Next update for plebbit-js will have full p2p capabilities including gossipsub using libp2p/helia in browser/mobile! We’re excited to ship that.