webtorrent VS dat

It's because of the kind of content that is shared. BitTorrent serves a lot of content you are not allowed to redistribute, so having an open gateway immediately puts you at risk of aiding the distribution of content. But it does work, someone even made something native to browsers so browsers themselves can share content: https://webtorrent.io/. There are even fuse "gateways" to make it native to your computer and pretend the files exist locally: https://github.com/search?q=bittorrent+fuse&type=repositorie...

IPFS doesn't seem to be used for that kind of content much, it seems to be targeted more towards web-native content (html pages, images, that kind of stuff). It's probably safer for Cloudflare to run this.

title. I have some experience with c++ but not much with torrent libraries. (webtorrent, stremio)

You can stream torrents

If it fits your model, WebTorrent[0] can offload a lot of bandwidth to peers.

[0] https://github.com/webtorrent/webtorrent

Then https://github.com/webtorrent/webtorrent could be used to actually download the videos in browser, the idea being here though, that you would at least seed out as much as you got. Enabling other's to access videos without requiring creators have the infrastructure to push a video to 1000s or more clients at once.

I assume you've seen https://webtorrent.io/ ?

I'm surprised you didn't include things like `dat`[0]

[0] https://github.com/dat-ecosystem-archive/dat

Gun is an opinionated high level and complete solution, it may provide more than what you need. I would think a more modular alternative is suitable, something like using libp2p. Anyway, you should take a look at the dat ecosystem and the ipfs ecosystem. Also, a really neat and clever way to simply do distributed peer discovery, removing the need for a signalling server, is bitboot (it uses mainline DHT).

Dat/Hypercore lets people share data with others, and you can build applications on top of it