libp2p looks like it’s at quite a mature stage. Why do you think we don’t see any apps developed on top of it apart from ipfs itself?
EDIT: by apps I mean something you can download from the app store, or a self-contained website with no required browser extensions.
There are certainly a ton of applications being built using LibP2P. Parity uses it, Chainsafe uses it, Prysmatic Labs uses it, basically every ETH2.0 client is using it. I’m sure if you search for libp2p on github or gitlab you’ll also find dozens of projects using it as well.
So there certainly are apps being built using it, perhaps you were just searching in the wrong places?
Thanks postables. It’s true, I didn’t do a whole lot of searching. Just noticed that on the libp2p homepage there’s no showcase, and that one hackernews comment couldn’t quite provide any good examples: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16818597
But Parity, Chainsafe and Prysmatic Labs all seem to have infrastructure as their primary focus. It seems all of them incorporate blockchain in one form or another too. I just searched github and what came up mostly are more libp2p implementations, other infrastructure projects and a few experiments.
Where’s the chat clients, video and audio conferencing, serverless multiplayer games, etc.? The closest that I could find to what I’m looking for are Berty and LivePeer, but neither of them are in production stage.
The only main ones that come to mind are Berty, and LivePeer (like you said). In terms of production ready libp2p apps, there’s not much really.
I think writing off all the apps building on IPFS as “not real libp2p users” doesn’t make sense. These apps are all dependent on libp2p, but they want additional tooling around how to create a distributed file system over the p2p networking layer (what IPFS offers to make it easier to build apps on top). Definitely still makes them users - and they encompass many of the areas you’re describing (though I’d love to see more!)
Here’s a recent demo of Matrix running on libp2p: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXrm5vj3PVI
Actyx is a big player for Libp2p too. They work in industry 4.0, connecting processing (physical) machines, to monitor, optimize industry processes. Computations is made on the edge, and they coordinate even on bad network conditions.
Netflix is about to use IPFS to move software containers around their infrastructure.
These are very interesting examples, thanks!
The only examples mentioned in this thread that use barebones libp2p were Actyx, Berty and LivePeer. All the others are applications of IPFS I believe.
The purpose of making libp2p independent from IPFS was to let developers use it to make their own applications, outside of IPFS. Otherwise, they’d have just kept it as an implementation detail.
Aren’t there any other applications at all?
