Overview of the Dat ecosystem

[aschrijver]

As discussed in other issues the Dat ecosystem is hard to discover by newcomers. This due to:

• Dispersed repositories, and - to lesser extent - documentation
• Docs mainly details dat-node, hyperdrive, hypercore, hyperdiscovery, and just a couple of links to other package repo's

So I took some time to turn this into a chart:

Its incomplete, of course (e.g. forgot to comb awesome-dat), and there are a lot of other community packages floating around.

Supported / official modules

If you consider dat, dat-node, dat-js and dat-desktop to be the 'product line' of the Dat Project, then all green modules must represent the 'official' modules of the ecosystem. The core modules. This because they are (transitive) dependencies of these projects.

Optional / sattelite / misc Dat Project modules

In orange the modules that are satellites to the core ecosystem, that are optional, or are apps, misc or abandoned projects created by the core team (except the orange '(many others)' category, which represents the wider community.

Important external packages

Non-Dat modules that are depended upon to implement vital technical concepts in the Dat architecture. The list is incomplete.

Conclusion

IMHO the official Dat Core ecosystem is indeed fragmented and confusing, and would benefit much from a cleanup. With current structure you do yourself a disservice when others don't discover the cool things you do.

[ralphtheninja]

@aschrijver Thanks for taking your time to put this together. It will help me while digging deeper.

[aschrijver]

Glad to be of help :)

[aschrijver]

FYI: I created a new dat awesome page that labels all ecosystem modules, similarly to chart above, to provide more clarity: https://github.com/datproject/discussions/issues/68