This is huge. I don’t say this lightly. This project is the holy grail that the privacy community has been clamoring for. There’s still a ton of work to be done building apps on top of this technology, but I think historians 40 years from now will look at this moment as when the internet transitioned from one era to the next. Our current paradigm of trusting our information to servers and datacenters subject to financial and government interests and interference is about to get laughed off the face of the earth.
That looks interesting indeed. Just a few thoughts:
On IPFS, you can run your own local node. It also functions as a cache where if you revisit a website, it takes the local copy making it much faster. How is that with Vailid?
What parts are taken from TOR? I find TOR pretty slow because it routes content over multiple nodes. Am I correct that veilid does not have the multi hop system? They have some technical information here but it is to limited for me to understand; Networking · Veilid
Okay, so I have an update. I found a great post on Lemmy from a developer who contributed to I2P (u/perestroika), who lays out their initial thoughts on what the differences are. The TL:DR; of it is
I2P is built entirely in Java, Veilid is built in Rust with a more modern API framework, so Veilid potentially has better performance and is more feature rich to app developers.
Veilid uses more modern cryptography/ciphers
Veilid is more future-proof/easier for developers to upgrade to newer standards under the hood, and apps don’t really have to worry about this
Veilid locally encrypts its storage, I2P does not.
My takeaway is that while the differences may seem minor, I’m hopeful a more modern take and freshly renewed implementation of a very sorely needed privacy-oriented communications framework will start getting people to adopt it.
There is a client for I2P network written in C++ - i2pd, it is much faster than Java version.
What is located in that storage for Veilid?
Most of the data, which I2P stores, is public anyway - information about other nodes in the network and about domain names.
Private keys for node are private, yeah, but I think in case when someone gains control over user’s device, nothing will help.
I’m not knowledgeable about p2p networks but I have heard Nostr is the best at this kind of thing. How does it compare to that? Is it a competitor to Nostr or is it different?
Nostr is a decentralized social media platform, but, as i understand, Veilid aims to be a much more fundamental system that, if applied on a global scale, can make many apps and resources (if not the whole internet) as private and resilient as Tor and IPFS. This is a whole different scale than Nostr. It IS a gamechanger if it takes off.
And it seems there’s no “blockchain” buzzword in there, so it’s one less reason to be skeptical.
Nostr’s current implementation is primarily social media, but its architecture is more fundamental than that. Nostr can be used for other things, and social media is just the most established implementation of it. That’s the gist I got from doing some basic research anyway. It seems that they’re doing similar things.
To call Nostr merely a decentralized social media platform would be like calling Tor…a browser. It does that, but it also has built the foundation upon which that system is laid upon. Nostr truly is decentralized, something like Mastodon is just federated, and still relies upon central (albeit more dispersed) servers.
I could be talking out of my ass here but that’s my current understanding.