Sorry about yesterday, I didn't get a lot done and was quite busy other stuff. I verified that webtorrent does use the bittorrent-tracker as a signaling server. That means by itself it really wouldn't be very decentralized, and looking at its code I really don't want to use it as a basis due to how messy it is. I also started fleshing out a plan for the UI. My main goal is to make it as simple as possible to use, and put more advanced features behind an options screen. There isn't much to do for it, just the design of the extension button, the comments page itself, and an options page. I'm thinking of putting a navbar on top for additional features, such as live chat for a particular url. I watched a video overview of the Elon Musk tweets as it relates to his purchase of twitter. I am not a fanboy of Elon at all, but this business deal has a lot of parrallels with the development of Captain Dirgo. With regard to bots, spam, etc. Captain Dirgo has an advantage here, in that all urls are hashed before they are stored in Captain Dirgo. This means that in order to spam a lot of urls and with the goal of getting a lot people to view it, you would have to go search through a ton of urls and hash each one, hoping for a hit with a lot of recent comments (as a proxy for future view count). Not only that, but you'd probably have to scour the web for what's new, since old urls would probably not get so many hits for your spam. This would be a kind of "natural" mining process that a spammer would have to do, and might make spam not profitable. Another thing Elon was discussing was putting Twitter on a blockchain and decided that a p2p network wouldn't be able to handle the load. Captain Dirgo has an advantage here because comments on each url are completely separate, which means that sharding is easy. I'm thinking I could do something like DHT to solve that issue, in that each node would handle a certain set of url hashes to hold data for. I was thinking of the purchase of Twitter itself. Suppose the purchase really did go through and they threw away the original code completely, it seems they are just buying two things. One, the name twitter and the popularity of that platform, and then also the destroying of the old platform, so anyone who used to use it has to find an alternative, and Elon Musk's new twitter would be the obvious choice. So effectively he's buying the chance to get the old twitter audience for $44 billion. It's equivalant to a $44 billion advertising campaign. So why would Captain Dirgo, which has zero brand recognition and zero initial audience, still have a chance to be a success? The one reason I can come up with is that it's always present and sort of rides on top of the brand recognition of the sites people visit when using it. There is always that curiosity factor of whether someone made a Captain Dirgo comment on a particular url. My biggest problem that I forsee as of now is how to handle it if the extension is blocked by google/mozilla. Side-loading it as a developer extension in Windows chrome is a big pain in the ass. Even after you go through the complicated process to do it, then everytime you start the browser it will nag you about all side-loaded extensions. Not to mention you'd have to side-load it all over again to get an update. I have a few options here. One is to make the extension a script for tampermonkey. Even though manifest v3 is going to become mandatory in 2023, and that will block Tampermonkey in its current form, I believe Tampermonkey will find a way to keep working. In other words, it makes my problem the same as Tampermonkey's problem. So that if Tampermonkey finds a way to solve it, then I can piggyback on their solution. Also, manifest v3 will block adblockers, so I think there is going to be some shift in the way things are done, which may allow me to keep the extension available and not too difficult to install. Another option is to create a patch for chromium to prevent it from making manifest v3 mandatory. I will do that if I have to, but I suspect someone else will do it before me. In any case, I'm going to try and publish it as is and hope the browsers accept it. I don't know why they banned dissenter, but hopefully they will overlook their objections for a completely open source p2p project like this one. (Gab Dissenter had most of its functionality done server side which was not open source, even though the extension was. Literally it just loaded a gab.com url within an iframe within the extension window) Besides all that, I was looking into https://ceramic.network/ today, which has a seems to have a lot of great ideas, although I don't really understand how it works yet. I'm going to look at it again tomorrow and see what I can use from it, or if I can just plug it in, out of the box.