Looking for Teammates - Local Website discovery

[RangerMauve]

The UX of publishing and finding websites on the distributed web doesn't seem to work well for local-first networks. Specifically, people still rely on central registries, blockchains, or existing chat channels to discover people's URLs. This works for internet networks since we can always connect to these services, however in cases where the internet is out, or people are on ad-hoc mesh networks, this breaks down.

Ideally people should be able to create and publish dweb sites and other people on their network should be able to discover them without needing to copy-paste links or use a centralized service of any sort.

For this I'd like to leverage libdweb in a Firefox extension, maybe extending dat-webext.

The goal would be to have a UI for creating dweb websites and to manage sharing / discovering them on the local network. It'd be good to get to a point where the extension would work on a wifi router, and from there try to get it working on an ad-hoc mesh network.

I've got expertise with peer to peer tech and the web from working at the Dat Foundation, so it'd be nice to get people interested in doing front-end and UX to make something easy to use. It'd be nice to work with people that have had issues with stuff not working offline so that we can make something that addresses those feelings.

[jonathandinu]

I'd be very interested! I have a somewhat speckled background/set of skills but started off doing Web Dev and product -> data science/ML/AI -> back in the wonderful WWW. I have recently starting diving head first into DAT and SSB with a bit of Web Assembly (and Rust) thrown in but haven't built any really substantial projects with them. And in a former life I am an HCI PhD dropout 😝

[achou11]

Hey @RangerMauve! This is a cool idea so wanted to subscribe to this. I've been doing mostly frontend for the past couple of years so could help out there (lots of React...like lots 😄)

[pajelly]

Hi @RangerMauve! I'm interested in learning more about your idea and where you see it going! I do UX/UI design and research:)

[RangerMauve]

Sweet. How about a call with everyone interested some time tomorrow? I've got a thing at 17:00 ET but I'm pretty free before that. 😁 Maybe we could use Jitsi?

[pajelly]

@RangerMauve Sounds good. Is there any way we can communicate as a group on slack?

[DeltaF1]

This sounds like a really cool project! Discovery is a huge problem that I encounter all the time when trying to share identifiers for decentralized content even between my own devices. It would be really great to replicate something like firefox sync's "send tab" sharing/discovery workflow in a local manner :slightly_smiling_face:

My experience is in application development and web security. I believe I have a pretty strong theoretical grasp of the crypto/network side of distributed software but not much practical experience contributing code to dweb projects.

[new23d]

I'd be quite interested in assisting with or at least knowing how to solve the discovery problem without "use a centralized service of any sort".

• Use of DNS will need every peer needing to use the same set of DNS servers (hence centralised).
• Multicast/IGMP doesn't work in routed networks unless they are customised/configured to do so.

[jonathandinu]

Any particular time work for folks for the call? I am free all day and in UTC -4h (ET)

[RangerMauve]

How about 17:00 ET today? https://meet.jit.si/local-web-disco

@pajelly Did you mean the Spring Labs slack?

[achou11]

17:00 works for me 👍

[jonathandinu]

👌

[pajelly]

@RangerMauve Yup the Mozilla slack & sounds good for 17:00 ET