There are a couple I have in mind. Like many techies, I am a huge fan of RSS for content distribution and XMPP for federated communication.
The really niche one I like is S-expressions as a data format and configuration in place of json, yaml, toml, etc.
I am a big fan of Plaintext formats, although I wish markdown had a few more features like tables.
IPFS would replace Content Delivery Networks in present day.
It would also allow you to host software and other content from your own network again without the constraints modern Internet Service Providers pose on you to limit your self-hosting capabilities.
If applications are built for it, it could serve as live storage for your applications too.
We ran ipf-search. In one of the experiments we could show that a distributed search index on ipfs-search, accessible through JavaScript is likely feasible with the necessary research. Parts of the index would automatically be hosted by clients who used the index thus creating a fairly resilient system.
Too bad IPFS couldn’t get over the technical hurdles of limiting connection setup time. We could get a fast (ElasticSearch based) index running and hosted over common web technologies, but fetching content from IPFS directly was generally rather slow.
Would you be interested in a similar protocol that supports more things (and is IMO easier to set up)?
I’m not actively looking but please do share references! Other people may read this and they may want to know too. Perhaps I’ll jump back in the rabbit hole at some point too 😁
Okay here it goes!
Tenfingers sharing protocol & python implementation (your python needs cryptodomex, or use the frozen executables).
http://tenfingers.org
You share theirs, they share yours (all encrypted)! So no benevolent nodes or crypto and it’s 100% decentralised.
I’m working on a better documentation on how to set it up (just forward a port and run setup basically).