(2010-09-04) Hosting And Future Proofing P2P App

If you're building a P2P app, esp for a Dark Net...

• you want to avoid having a Single Point Of Failure - having the system brought down by government order or corporate action

• you want individuals to be able to self-host, whether by Home Server or Hosted Server.

• you want to keep the system easy to install on a variety of hosts

• any given host should be able to host 1 person, a few people, or an arbitrarily large number of people

• it should be relatively easy to move an individual's host from server to server

• the system will be changing over time

Implications

• you can't count on every host running the same version of software, so you need a forgiving protocol

• you probably want it to be a WebApp so self-hosting uses a Desktop Web Server.

  • but to avoid people having to buy a Domain, having DNS being a Choke Point, and working around NAT issues....

    • use Http Over Xmpp?

    • Dec'2010 idea by Aaron Swartz (TOR and other stuff)

• you probably want to stick with SQL for your Data Store so that the small-server install can use SQLite, since it's preinstalled on almost all computers these days