Tuning into the daily livestream of the development of this experiment over the past 3 weeks has been very satisfying and fun (virtual co-working vibe). Paul has done great work here and put a ton of effort in. It's worth taking a look at the links in his comment here and keeping this project on your radar.
Yes and no. The tech is like the “Internet” and is largely born from academic work and continues forward as fundamental and foundational p2p networking advancements. It’s not a consumer product itself but obviously builders have and will fill that void. Beaker is the best example but eventually more and some projects you may have heard about are actually using some aspects of hypercore.
The tech is solid, there is no doubt. However, Despite following Dat since about 6 years ago, the general organization has always been lacking. I took a break from following it and all “tech” for all of 2020 as I needed a breather and focused on other offline interests. The new Beaker Browser v1 was finally released which was a big milestone and this news hit my radar. It inspired me to delve back in to this particular technology and went down the hyper rabbit hole. I read about the change from Dat to Hyper and spent the last week or so trying to grok all the reorg and docs. It’s dizzying. I’m both very interested in using this tech again and sadly also frustrated with the org issues which seem not so much better than previous but just different.
On a high level, there are improvements from rebrand to abstraction and generalization of components to allow for a better path forward. I can def see a developer who never followed Dat having a lot of problems grasping Hyper Protocol without investing a lot of upfront time... since it’s been difficult for me who has used Dat pretty extensively and followed all things Dat prior to 2020.
I think they are going about this the right way, though, and it will just take time for it all to get calibrated and be more cohesive. I’m sure they will take all the help they can get so hopefully more people will get involved because the tech has def improved a lot and IMO is a big deal in p2p.
ZeroNet does not use blockchain tech beyond same cryptography as Bitcoin (and by extension bitcoin addresses). But it does not use "blockchain" for anything core.
You could prob swap this question for "what is the difference between DAT and Bit Torrent" since ZeroNet also uses BT and DAT is similar tech... but this has been answered already.
Outside of this, DAT is agnostic and modular while ZeroNet is focused on p2p website. So a comparison of ZN and Beaker (rather than DAT) would make more sense since both have same focus. Beaker's approach is to use a web browser wrapper (electron/chrome) while ZN is headless and allows you to use your existing web browsers. Beaker is able to offer more/different features because of the tight relationship with a browser app and this affords a powerful path forward beyond just serving static files as web pages. However, ZN also lets you leverage browser database and ability to make simple webapps.
It's really just different approaches to accomplish more or less the same goal of a p2p web. You could say Beaker is more cutting edge because it uses newer DAT (something new) and open to integrating IPFS etc vs being bound to BitTorrent (older tech).
The nice thing is, you can run ZeroNet and Beaker at same time and enjoy both p2p web networks ;-)
Yes, agreed. Of course overlap among projects is inevitable and it would be nice if there was more effort to coordinate and collaborate as this would allow for potential dev efficiencies (not guaranteed though). In this case, DAT is a practical and pragmatic approach where IPFS is more hinged in the crypto blockchain token space which can be a turn-off and add unnecessary baggage. The DAT and Beaker teams don't want to add that noise and have different philosophies, so it is better for now that these projects are independent and in future can assess and maybe a new project will treat both as prior art and converge the best parts. And around we go.
