I had to find this post[0] to fully understand what Hyperswarm is.
You may or may not be surprised to hear that connecting two computers over the Internet is difficult. Software needs to negotiate NATs, firewalls, and limited IPv4 addresses. This is one of many reasons why cloud services are so entrenched: they accept connections more reliably than home or mobile computers.
This is a challenge for Dat and the Beaker browser. Dat is a peer-to-peer network which needs to reliably connect users over the Internet and over LANs. Beaker uses Dat to serve websites without needing servers.
We currently rely on a tracker to get users connected. This is a tracker that we run, which isn’t ideal because we want Dat to be decentralized. We tried using BitTorrent’s Mainline DHT but the results just weren’t very good. Mainline doesn’t have the tools to hole-punch so the connections frequently failed, and live tests tended to give a lot of false-positives with few good hits.
So mafintosh decided to solve this by creating a new DHT which fits our needs.
Announcing the Hyperswarm preview
Hyperswarm is a stack of networking modules for finding peers and creating reliable connections. Users join the swarm for a “topic” and query periodically for other peers who are in the topic. When ready to connect, Hyperswarm helps create a socket between them using either UTP or TCP.
Hyperswarm uses a Kademlia DHT to track peers and arrange connections. The DHT itself includes mechanisms to holepunch NATs. For LAN-based discovery, we currently use multicast DNS.
You may or may not be surprised to hear that connecting two computers over the Internet is difficult. Software needs to negotiate NATs, firewalls, and limited IPv4 addresses. This is one of many reasons why cloud services are so entrenched: they accept connections more reliably than home or mobile computers.
This is a challenge for Dat and the Beaker browser. Dat is a peer-to-peer network which needs to reliably connect users over the Internet and over LANs. Beaker uses Dat to serve websites without needing servers.
We currently rely on a tracker to get users connected. This is a tracker that we run, which isn’t ideal because we want Dat to be decentralized. We tried using BitTorrent’s Mainline DHT but the results just weren’t very good. Mainline doesn’t have the tools to hole-punch so the connections frequently failed, and live tests tended to give a lot of false-positives with few good hits.
So mafintosh decided to solve this by creating a new DHT which fits our needs.
Announcing the Hyperswarm preview
Hyperswarm is a stack of networking modules for finding peers and creating reliable connections. Users join the swarm for a “topic” and query periodically for other peers who are in the topic. When ready to connect, Hyperswarm helps create a socket between them using either UTP or TCP.
Hyperswarm uses a Kademlia DHT to track peers and arrange connections. The DHT itself includes mechanisms to holepunch NATs. For LAN-based discovery, we currently use multicast DNS.
[0]: https://pfrazee.hashbase.io/blog/hyperswarm