Once upon a time, I built a proof of concept distributed social network that ran entirely on cell phones.

I eventually ran into enough complications that I abandoned the project. But the tech did work. I could create posts, add friends, etc. (It just wasn’t reliable in its sync mechanism and I gave up trying to fix it.)

So… Imagine Lemmy, but a community’s data is stored collaboratively on mobile devices, the load shared by all its subscribers.

We all walk around with goddamn supercomputers in our pockets. We should put them to work.

I haven’t found any projects using this protocol yet, so looks like it’s in an early stage of adoption for now.

In addition to iroh there is https://github.com/earthstar-project/meadowcap-js and other projects under https://github.com/earthstar-project. See https://willowprotocol.org/more/projects-and-communities/index.html#projects_and_communities

So while I’m myself struggling to fully understand what this is, it conceptually like it’s a blockchain on syncthing, where even if you subscribe to a read only share, you can locally delete what you don’t want to keep. So technically you could make bitorrent to behave like syncthing with search function for contacts you already know.