DatDot Today! (tomorrow, and the future)

Hello World!

This is Joshua writing, partially to test out Subsocial and partially to give a semi-informal public status update for people who aren't/haven't been following our other channels.

DatDot is a set of tools (substrate pallets, a chain [wip], js libraries, and an app) intended to allow communities to create decentralized and automated pinning services for anything using the Hypercore-protocol (fka. Dat). Dat acts similarly to IPFS, in that it is a distributed protocol for data, but intended for dynamic (instead of static) append-only logs - which can be used to represent anything from filesystems, decentralized chats, and other data structures!

We are currently making good progress towards our second grant milestone - but the scope of DatDot has significantly evolved since definition of those milestones, and we're very near completion (as in the complete scope of the grant) on several fronts, especially in our JS service-side code which is already a pretty complete framework and already "just does" what it needs to do, thanks to my awesome teammates.

What is mostly done:

• Offchain service logic for hosting, encoding, and distributing hypercores (only pending some optimization and reliability fixes)

What remains of our second milestone:

• the "milestone-2" version of our pallets and chain, to match the current code-spec -> this is my (Joshua's) Job, so I'm the bottleneck now, yay!
• simple/alpha-stage onchain "economics"/hosting statistics. -> the remaining parts of this are also mostly bottlenecked on me.
• improving reliability of our hoster<->encoder communication.

What is being worked on outside of our official milestones:

• Further refinement of our applet interface
• Figuring out how to inject Dat support into any and all browsers securely without an extension (if you aren't using Beaker or Agregore, among other options in our growing ecosystem)

What I'm doing when procrastinating:

• Hacking the chain code-spec to act as an adaptor for pallet-identity as a key-value store, so we can start testing out the frontend portions of DatDot on any chain with pallet-identity, and give users of those chains access to pinning Dats