I try not to get emotionally invested in any of the protocol debates, but I really hate it when people look at one of the miracles of the internet and decide to be retarded and ungrateful instead
So here is a crash course for the 1000 times.
1. A DHT is a self organising sharding mechanism, made of very cheap to run servers, with expectations of high churn.
2. Any client behind a firewall is NOT a part of the DHT, so any Bittorrent client that doesn't successfully open ports automatically, doesn't count in the millions of routers in the DHT.
3. The numbers of nodes in the DHT are not fake, there are no official numbers, you calculate these numbers statistically by observing your own node's routing table, each node in that table is a node you literally contacted yourself, noted it's ip address.
4. Most implementations, certainly mine, enforces a limit of nodes per region and rejects multiple nodes from the same IP etc. So the mossad would have to own shit tons of computers in every country on earth to fake these numbers, .. just to what? To know that you are downloading pirated movies? Be real.
5. Permissionless DHTs are theoretically vulnerable to Sybil, Yes, 100%, but Bitcoin is vulnerable to a lot of shit in theory, in practice however quantity has a quality of its own, and when you have millions of organic nodes, it becomes very expensive to attack specific range of the DHT, and even then that attack will be very detectable and then clients can react by querying more nodes further and further from the target.
6. Attacking the entire DHT to make a specific attack undetectable would require running 20X more fake nodes than the honest nodes.
7. Nodes are soooo cheap to run, they have an LRU cache, churn at will etc... still because there are millions of them, you can easily scale to billions of published records with good reliability... I dare you to try to overwhelm it... Try it.
8. You only need the DHT to work relaliably _some_ of the time... Everything else can be a caching server like DNS work, and you still get the censorship resistance because the DHT is better than ICANN root servers.
9. If you don't want to use a DHT don't, Iroh is perfectly happy with it, and Pkarr is perfect for machines especially, but even I am looking for Blockchain based alternatives because I want more for humans... But please stop lying and detering people from using Mainline DHT, it is a miracle that we didn't deserve but we have it, and if applications stopped injecting the DHT and open ports, the numbers will dwindle on the long term. If you are building a P2P application especially Bittorrent make sure to put DHT in it and encourage people to open ports or just open it automatically for them, it is great to have such free routing that costs individuals very little but enable magnificent things at scale.
In practice:
Having arbitrary files doesn't help much, as any protocol aiming to be interoperable will have to agree on a standard anyway.
Because the homeserver is so flexible it also lacks a querying language for getting the posts that follow a certain standard (whatever is their kind:1, for example) efficiently directly by clients. Of course one can be bolted on, but they don't seem to care about this.
They have chosen instead to solve it by having an aggregation layer on top: a central server that connects to each home server, inefficiently, and indexes them. After that "clients" connect directly to this aggregator server, blindly trust it (because there are no signatures) and live happily in fully centralized environment (this part is exactly like Bluesky).
The possibility of having keys always offline is good, but in practice it doesn't make much difference. Most users have the same likelihood to lose the keys anyway.
Claims of maximum decentralization and infallible discovery using the BitTorrent DHT remain to be proven: DHTs are beautiful in practice but I'm not convinced they scale in the real world. Relying on people serving your content against their will or without even knowing they're doing that can't be a reliable solution. The BitTorrent DHT numbers are also suspicious, they're way too big, I would guess this is either fake, a lot of home users that hurt the network more than help because they can't accept connections, or ran by the Mossad. Another weird part of the protocol is that because browsers can't connect to the DHT directly they rely on these gateway servers -- now, if this is it, why can't these gateways just store the keys anyway and be the discovery layer? DHT not necessary. (I already see @Nuh complaining the DHT offers ultimate censorship-resistance that the gateways can't, ok).
After all is said and done, I think Nostr could benefit from a "generic filesystem" abstraction at some point, but this can easily be done later using normal servers.
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