- 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
by woctordho
2 subcomments
- What a pity that although webtorrent support is already merged in the libtorrent master branch years ago, it's not merged into the stable branch yet, therefore not working out of the box in clients like qBittorrent.
by mcjiggerlog
1 subcomments
- 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.
- 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.
by DJBunnies
3 subcomments
- Every time I try these they never work, including this one.
I’m not sure what the value prop is over just using a torrent client?
Maybe when they’re less buggy they’ll become a thing.
- I wonder if these colors are a kind of a watermark that are hardcoded as system instructions. Almost all slopware made using claude have the same color palette. So much for a random token generator to be this consistent
- > Enhanced security with DOMPurify integration!
> XSS Protection - All HTML sanitized with DOMPurify
> Malicious Code Removal - Dangerous tags and attributes filtered
> Sandboxed Execution - Sites run in isolated iframe environment
I don't think that super makes sense. You probably just want the iframe sandbox and not remove all js. Or ideally put the torrent hash as the subdomain to use same origin policy.
- I built something similar a while back: Distribyted Gate: it turns any magnet link into a browsable webpage.
The key difference is the approach: it uses a Service Worker as an embedded HTTP server in the browser. This means files are loaded on-demand rather than requiring full downloads upfront. The SW intercepts fetch requests and streams chunks directly from the torrent swarm.
Live demos using some PeerWeb demo sites:
- Chess: https://gate.distribyted.com/?tid=1e14b1ba7fcd03e5f165d53ed8...
- Functionality test page: https://gate.distribyted.com/?tid=90c020bd252639622a14895a0f...
Code: https://github.com/distribyted/gate
Caveat: This is a proof of concept, so stability varies and it works best on Chromium-based browsers.
- 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.
by logicallee
1 subcomments
- 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
by littlecranky67
1 subcomments
- Cool. Some people complained about broken demos, I uploaded the mdwiki.info [1] website unaltered and seems to work fine [0]. MDwiki is a single .html file that fetches custom markdown via ajax relative to the html file and renders it via Javascript.
[0]: https://peerweb.lol/?orc=b549f37bb4519d1abd2952483610b8078e6...
[1]: https://dynalon.github.io/mdwiki/
- I can't imagine that Peerweb has much in the way of stopping certain types of material from being uploaded.
by gnarbarian
0 subcomment
- 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
by turtleyacht
1 subcomments
- Github: https://github.com/omodaka9375/peerweb
- In the past ZeroNet was performant enough to realistically share websites but it's abandoned (ZeroNet Conservacy exist but no active peers seems to exists) this allow client to use an website without installing anything, which is nice, but how to get things visible initially it's well... A human challenge...
by Omodaka9375
0 subcomment
- Hi, Omodaka here thanks for checking out PeerWeb. I forgot to turn the client to serve the demos - should be better now ;)
This is meant to work with PeerWeb App which is more secure and stripped down torrent desktop client, that you can use to share your websites and host them through peerweb.lol. Still haven't released the dektop client but might do it.
Point of this is for everyone to host their content without needing servers, and as a great learning experience. Security is very big caviat here, so in no way is this final secure version.
- In its own reimagined way from what’s possible in 2026, this could kick off a new kind of geocities.
by BrouteMinou
0 subcomment
- Nice, I clicked on the first demo, and I got stuck at connecting with peers.
I like the idea though.
- Heads up: I left a Peerweb link open overnight (~8 hours) hoping it would load. It consumed ~15GB of memory and triggered an OOM kill, crashing the browser. Browser: LibreWolf (latest) OS: Fedora 43
by keepamovin
1 subcomments
- I'm glad to see this was not unexpectedly fast to load. Would not want to upset those distributed expectations! I wonder if there's a business model in selling speed on a robust network that is on average too slow. Is there anyway to incentivize more nodes through micropayments distributed from people who pay for their site to be served faster?
Ultimately I guess the distributed web is felled by economics thus far.
- the problem is always updating regularly.
I liked BitTorrent Sync, but it was always closed source, and now it's part of something called Resilio.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7
2 subcomments
- No Javascript
https://github.com/Omodaka9375/peerweb
https://github.com/Omodaka9375/peerweb/releases/expanded_ass...
If the address is a hash perhaps it could contain a public key
- None of the demo sites work for me.
Probably needs more testing and debugging.
- I have been intrigued by WebTorrent for a while. From my experience downloading Linux distros over Torrent, I know that it works really well when many people contribute.
But I have never had a successful experience with WebTorrent, presumably because it is less popular and I have never found a use-case where enough peers were sharing?
- reminds me a bit if ZeroNet, which still has a maintained fork somewhere out there https://github.com/zeronet-conservancy/zeronet-conservancy/
- 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.
- Somebody has to revive Nullsoft WASTE p2p from 2003 tho
by cyrusradfar
3 subcomments
- OT: Can someone vibe-code Geocities back to life?
- This is probably going to be taken down like my site was that used Web Torrent.
dropclickpaste.com is for sale. kruhft.at.gmail.com
- What do you all think of the chances that we have decentralized AI infrastructure like this at some point?
- Can sanitation be disabled? I.e. can this be used to access static websites as-is?
by rickcarlino
0 subcomment
- 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).
- Good, important idea. Unfortunately bad, low effort vibe coded execution
- 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.
- Is the tracker down? Can't open the demos...
- Why does every sentence have an emoji?
- Useless if it takes > 5 sec. to load a page
- Nice idea. Shame absolutely everything about the website screams AI slop.
- connection overhead is way too much for modern world.
- Napster.. so what happens if peerweb.lol goes down?
by maximgeorge
0 subcomment
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- 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?
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