01-30-2019, 06:55 PM
The age-old dilemma of peer-to-peer networking: how to find peers to connect to if you don't know about them beforehand?
Some P2P programs come bundled with a list of peers known to have been online recently, known as the peer cache. The program adds new peers as it discovers them through connections with known peers, and deletes old ones that haven't been online in awhile.
But what if you haven't been online in a long time, and all of the known peers have gone offline (or their IP addresses have changed) since you were last on? Most networks solve this problem by having every peer register with a central server when it comes online. The server sends back a list of online peers that the new peer can then connect to. The server periodically checks all of the peers and discards any that have gone offline, ensuring that the list is always fresh. The only reason PowWow doesn't work today is that the central server went offline when Tribal Voice folded. Some fans built their own server and resurrected it for awhile, but I wasn't able to get online when I tried it recently. Maybe there's something else I need to do. WinMX still works because a fan wrote a patch for it.
Regardless of all of that, requiring a central server isn't exactly a decentralized solution, is it? If the server was controlled by a slimy SJW corporation, the company could refuse your connection attempts or refuse to register your peer, and you'd be in the same mess that social media users are in. If the server was run by a private individual, crusading SJWs could get the peer list from the server and harass or DDoS the peers.
You also have to consider that a guy like me writing a decentralized P2P network program probably isn't going to be inclined to operate a central server, as that would be self-contradictory. All I'm going to do is give you the option to use one, if one exists and you're inclined to use it.
https://imgur.com/a/iDvId74
Some P2P programs come bundled with a list of peers known to have been online recently, known as the peer cache. The program adds new peers as it discovers them through connections with known peers, and deletes old ones that haven't been online in awhile.
But what if you haven't been online in a long time, and all of the known peers have gone offline (or their IP addresses have changed) since you were last on? Most networks solve this problem by having every peer register with a central server when it comes online. The server sends back a list of online peers that the new peer can then connect to. The server periodically checks all of the peers and discards any that have gone offline, ensuring that the list is always fresh. The only reason PowWow doesn't work today is that the central server went offline when Tribal Voice folded. Some fans built their own server and resurrected it for awhile, but I wasn't able to get online when I tried it recently. Maybe there's something else I need to do. WinMX still works because a fan wrote a patch for it.
Regardless of all of that, requiring a central server isn't exactly a decentralized solution, is it? If the server was controlled by a slimy SJW corporation, the company could refuse your connection attempts or refuse to register your peer, and you'd be in the same mess that social media users are in. If the server was run by a private individual, crusading SJWs could get the peer list from the server and harass or DDoS the peers.
You also have to consider that a guy like me writing a decentralized P2P network program probably isn't going to be inclined to operate a central server, as that would be self-contradictory. All I'm going to do is give you the option to use one, if one exists and you're inclined to use it.
https://imgur.com/a/iDvId74
