| Developer of Orbit here. Great to hear all the feedback, thank you! Most questions have been already answered, but to clarify: Orbit indeed uses IPFS pubsub (https://github.com/ipfs/go-ipfs/pull/3202) for real-time message propagation, no servers are involved. In addition, it uses orbit-db (https://github.com/haadcode/orbit-db) - a distributed database on IPFS - for the message history, so the messages are not ephemeral and the channel history can always be retrieved. This is a really nice property and allows Orbit to work in "disconnected" or split networks, as well as offline. Orbit has been a testbed for IPFS applications and orbit-db came out of that work, enabling various types of distributed, p2p applications and use cases: comment systems, votes/likes/starring systems (with counters), feeds, etc. And now with IPFS pubsub, we're finally at a point of being completely serverless and distributed which is hugely exciting and opens so many doors for future work! I recently gave a talk at Devcon2 about Orbit and developing distributed real-time applications (https://ethereumfoundation.org/devcon/?session=orbit-distrib...) and while the videos of the talk are not out yet (afaik coming very soon!), there's the uncut video of the talk here http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMTc1NjU1NzEyNA==.html?firsttim... if you're interested to learn more. Video of the demo I showed in the talk is here https://ethereumfoundation.org/devcon/wp-content/uploads/201.... I'll be hanging out on #ipfs in Orbit if you're interested to try it out. Note that the Electron app and the web version at orbit.libp2p.io don't talk to each other atm (we're working on this), so I would highly recommend to try out the Electron app. While you're at it, try drag & dropping files and folders to a channel, that's one of the coolest feature of Orbit atm imo :) We're actively developing Orbit and making a push in the next few months, if you're interested to take part in the design and development, or would like to develop your own apps using the same tech, join us on Github https://github.com/haadcode/orbit/issues. Thanks for the comments everyone, much appreciated! |