Amazing seeing this actually working.
If I remember correctly, you’ve had a vision for this for a very long time. It’s fantastic to see it happening now Autonomi is maturing & devs are figuring out how to use it.
Seriously great work!
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This is a major achievement for the whole of Autonomi. 
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A minor announcement, not new but mentioned because I have only just tested this and it isn’t even in the README yet.
Non need to set SECRET_KEY
You no longer have to set SECRET_KEY to use dweb to publish websites or work with apps. If you don’t set SECRET_KEY it will use your ant wallet instead and ask you for the password to unlock it.
Browser Wallets
If someone would like to create a demo dweb app that shows how to get a browser wallet secret I will add an API to pass this to the app’s server for use in API calls, and use your app to test it.
I doubt that’s hard but just don’t have time to do everything! Not right away anyway.
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By the way, how does this differ from any other websites, that are not published with dweb? Public data is persistent anyway, right? So all the previous versions of any website should be somehow possible to dig up? But dweb makes it all organized?
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In theory immutable data is available forever, but it is only available if you know where it is.
In practice, if a website is published you either use a History/Register (dweb) or a Pointer (to the latest version) or share an address which is not updatable and you will have to keep track of all those addresses yourself or depend on someone else.
The effective way to ensure access to versioned data is to share a public History (or Register), and that’s what dweb does. One address or name that holds every published version and cannot be edited or deleted.
Dweb also provides the API needed for anyone to easily access all those versions with a standard browser and no extras/plugins.
If you don’t have something that keeps track of all previous versions, you won’t be able to access them. It’s a simple idea but making it effective, easy for publishers and authors, and easy for visitors has been the challenge.
Now things are working so well I hope more people will want to get online and create. I remember how enthusiastic people were the first time around. It was fun! Things are much easier now so many more people can do this if they want.
The main barrier with Autonomi is the need for two kinds of token and multiple wallets for publishing. But hopefully there are enough of us who want to publish websites and apps to give people a reason to come and try them (without having to get involved with crypto first).
To view websites on Autonomi all you need is dweb and everything will work just like the regular web, but free of tracking, advertising, surveillance and censorship.
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One thing I’m seeking to understand is how links work. If there’s a link to a data in a website, that link will work forever, no matter how the website was published?
I mean it’s great that dweb does what it does. But it’s not clear to me what are the doings of dweb and what’s just Autonomi?
And I have been thinking about “no link rot” as one great property of Autonomi.
I’m sorry if I mix things a bit, and if this goes off topic, let’s just stop and maybe continue in another thread. I don’t wanna derail.
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I think these are good and relevant questions, but it can get complicated.
None of this comes free just because it’s on Autonomi, but it can’t be done without that foundation. It also depends on how people build and it’s going to be easy to build things that don’t have these good properties.
dweb aims to make it easy for developers and publishers to incorporate these advantages, but they can of course go their own way.
In addition, dweb encourages adoption by developers and publishers by making use and access to their website and apps as easy as possible for end users.
As for links, internal links are rock solid providing they use local paths which is the norm, and supported by all standard tooling for building and testing. No need for xor addresses or special protocols either.
Aside: a key benefit for developers and website builders being able to work exactly as they do now (design, build and test), and when ready to deploy, run a single command. This is what dweb delivers.
Linking to external sites is more tricky. dweb provides options for a site to link to another site using either a specific version or the latest version of the target. Using latest can break since an update might have deleted the link target, but the original target can still be found by going back through the target site’s history.
dweb can link to individual resources either directly via an xor address, or to a History with a path, or an Archive with a path. So it also provides flexibility when a developer wants to do something special.
As you see there’s a lot to it and I’ve not thought about how to convey all this in an easily understandable way for developers let alone everyone else, so I’m not sure how helpful this is!
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Maybe traversing to original can be defaulted in case the latest is broken.
Thanks for explaining - and first of all making all this.
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I’m really on the edge of making a site myself. I’ve just been too tired of heavy physical labor I need to do nowadays. Next week I might have a breather, and create some sort of “Hello world!”.
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An (obvious?) idea:
- Rent a few vps around the world, 1 / continent. Run dwep on each of them.
- Reserve a short dns name.
- Start selling a service which will provide mapping from an alias to autonomi content. Cost 1$ / month or something like that.
Someone willing to publish a web page just uploads the data to autonomi and pays 1$/month to make it available around the globe, also for an average user who knows nothing about autonomi.
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Thanks for the suggestion. Yes it is obvious, but for me the point of p2p and the design of dweb is to avoid third party services and servers. Of course people will do this, but I don’t like that approach and think we should be able to do better.
My focus is always on the fundamentals, so I’ll continue to make access to Autonomi as simple and easy as possible for as many people as possible. I’ll be sad if the project has lost this focus.
While moving my boat today I was thinking about this, prompted by @riddim’s comments and wondering if when dweb starts, it could open a welcome screen/web app which checks for a local wallet and offers to create one, and ideally funds it using the faucet created by @ambled.
It’s very cheap to use most apps so I think we could make browsing and app adoption as simple as installing dweb and running it. Bingo, you are browsing and can use frugal apps.
Add to that the option to run a couple of nodes using a bit of @bochaco’s code from Formicaio, and we’re nearly there. No third parties, wallet hidden away until needed and anyone can access Autonomi with no special skills.
That is what I’d like to see. Anybody want to help make this happen?
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Yes, thats the ultimate goal, but meanwhile (until all 5.5 billion internet users know about Autonomi 
) it might draw some content providers to use Autonomi as cheap and fast data storage. Of course, it would not prevent direct www page download from Autonomi.
I just don’t think it’s helpful in practice.
Pros and cons here, but one of the cons is you reduce the value of using Autonomi itself if it’s content is served through a gateway, and you create a space for honeypots, bait and switch, and all sort of bad things if you give cover by suggesting this is ok.
Sometimes you need to be a purist otherwise you end up working against what to ultimately want.
So I much prefer making things super easy without sacrificing the USP.
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ant.site is available if you wanna go for it 
Hannu-hosting.ant.site
Fwiw I think all publicity is good publicity at this point
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This is really important imo and to make things easy, teachable and duplicatable which you are doing . I’ll be making a website soon. Keep on trucking, er boating!
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Did I mention that I found this project because I was annoyed by the domain name system and was looking for a way to just use a name I want to use? (with the additional list of tld it now looks even more random that I cannot just use my first name +last name as website name… firstname.wtf is a valid domain name..)
Random rules for scarcity…
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@happybeing idk why it took me this long but I suddenly look at Dweb and instantly think Dark Web, assuming this was not intentional, or was it?
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Never occurred to me 
I guess it depends on the individual 
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