Good to see Dat still alive, but without solve for mobile NAT traversal and persistent seed incentives, these p2p protocols never escape hobbyist tier.

Another interesting dat-ecosystem project is an open source messenger as potentially an alternative to keet.

https://codeberg.org/LTC-GT/Quibble

I think DAT is mostly dead, even the Beaker browser is no longer around I think?

Anyways, new projects like Keet.io keep the p2p dream alive, or at least, give it a zombie-like undead experience.

The P2P protocols that actually escape hobbyist tier tend to solve one of two boring problems: NAT traversal, or an incentive to keep serving data when the original publisher is gone. Dat tried to do both with big payloads, which is the hard quadrant.

Nostr is a useful contrast, though it sidesteps more than it solves: relays are intentionally dumb and replaceable stores, identity lives entirely in the keys, and the payloads are small. A dead relay is just a reconnect. That model breaks the moment the interesting payloads get large, at which point you need exactly the durability and seeding incentives Dat never quite cracked. So 'relay mesh + keys' is a great answer for small messages and a non-answer for files.

The persistent complaint about NAT traversal is also worth taking seriously: anything that requires a public reachable peer as a rendezvous point tends to end up depending on a central service, which is why these ecosystems keep re-centralizing around bootstrap nodes.

P2P application layers always sound great on paper until you have to deal with NAT traversal and partition healing in the wild. Interested to see how they handle state sync edge cases.