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by olodus 2345 days ago
Last I checked a lot of the consensus were that the Dat project was more mature than IPFS and that it had some advantages over IPFS (such as not using as much resources to run). How is it now? Is it more mature? Even though I actually even sub to their newsletter I haven't really been keeping up to date if they have made any major releases.

Not to be a downer on IPFS at all, btw. I'm very glad that both it and Dat exist. IPFS has always seemed like a much larger undertaking and it is cool thst they are trying to push the dweb even further. We need that just as much as we need Dat, which with its inclusion in the Beaker browser for example really serves as a super cool demo of what dweb can give us in the future.

4 comments

I have quite a bit of experience with IPFS and I tried Dat once. It seems to me that Dat works much better, but I think the immutability of IPFS is its killer feature, Dat is thus much less interesting to me.
Underlying dat data is immutable. It's the constructs built on top that provide mutability. Dat is fundamentally a chain of immutable chunks, some having a special meaning to say what the data means (file/folder) and where to look for it. Once a chunk is there it will 'ever ever change. It is perfectly possible to play with those only.
You can check out this recent article comparing the two: https://medium.com/@jaygraber/comparing-ipfs-and-dat-8f3891d... -- they have their own foci and technical decisions (ex IPFS is aiming for more general content addressing/deduplication of data across many hosts, while Dat focuses on append-only feeds from a particular source)
Well, Beaker is being rethought and rewritten right now - hopefully it survives that process.
I've tried both extensively. Both suck. And they're not really comparable, except on their problems.