January 30, 2026
Seeding drama, not just sites
Peerweb: Decentralized website hosting via WebTorrent
GeoCities vibes or single-point fail? The internet can’t agree
TLDR: PeerWeb lets people host and share websites through a peer-to-peer swarm instead of a central server. Commenters are split: fans say it could make sites harder to take down and bring back DIY web culture, while skeptics argue the portal is still a weak link and WebTorrent’s momentum is uncertain.
PeerWeb promises website hosting without servers: drag-and-drop a site, share a hash, and let WebTorrent’s peer-to-peer swarm keep it live. There’s even “smart caching,” a security scrubber, and a shiny demo with SomaFM. Sounds unstoppable, right? The comments are where it gets spicy.
Skeptics pounced first. One top voice asked the beginner’s question with a sting: if you upload through their portal and share their link, isn’t that still a single point of failure? That cracked open the core fight: bold decentralization pitch vs. real-world entry points. Meanwhile, optimists cheered the potential to turn traffic into armor—more visitors, more peers, less chance anyone can knock a site offline. One commenter even framed it as a DIY shield against DDoS attacks (internet pile-ons), powered by browsers instead of big servers.
Nostalgia rolled in, too: “a new GeoCities” but for 2026—chaotic, creative, user-built. Then came the cold shower: veterans lament WebTorrent’s “lovely design” but years of stagnation, wondering if this comeback can stick. A helpful passerby dropped the GitHub receipts, and the crowd poked at features like a debug mode for nerds who love progress bars. Verdict? The tech is cool, but the community is split between “finally decentralized” and “same old bottlenecks in new clothes.”
Key Points
- •PeerWeb uses WebTorrent to distribute static websites over a peer-to-peer network.
- •Users can upload sites via drag-and-drop and load existing sites by entering a torrent hash.
- •PeerWeb automatically adds magnet link prefixes and trackers when loading sites.
- •Features include a debug mode (&debug=true), smart caching, and DOMPurify-based content sanitization.
- •Requirements include an index.html, relative resource paths, and serving in a sandboxed environment.