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Publish all the things! Full Dat registry support.
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@joehand joehand released this 05 Jun 18:36
· 132 commits to master since this release
v13.6.0
643af75
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joehand Joe Hand
GPG key ID: 22324E3F975FBBE6
Learn about vigilant mode.

The Dat project registry is here! This release has a pretty short changelog with a big potential. As part of our grant from the Knight Foundation, we are creating a public registry for dats. You can now sign up, publish your dats, and use the datproject.org registry via the CLI!

  • Explore some of the existing dats. datproject.org caches data and we have our example dats shared on our server to ensure higher availability.
  • Create an account an publish your dats!

Why is dat publish so cool?

We are super excited about dat publish and its potential to create a decentralized Github for data. Dat's persistent identifiers, built in version control, and live updates mean you only have to "publish" a dat once, unlike git or npm. Dat's distributed network means this data can be stored anywhere after it is published, unlike Dropbox or Google Drive, which store all your data on their servers.

What happens when I publish?

  • dat publish associates your dat link with your username and your dat name. This allows users to download it, such as dat clone datproject.org/jhand/cli-demo.
  • datproject.org does not store your dat when you publish. We cache data when you visit a dat online, but only if it available at that moment.

The registry not storing data is a bit counterintuitive compared to npm or git, which have centralized servers hosting your repos. For someone to download your data (or view it online) you have to be running dat share, dat sync, or sharing your dat in Dat Desktop.

This is a new concept to many users more used to centralized services and may cause some learning pains. We do this will give users more control over where their data goes and how it is stored. We're working on ways to make hosting dats easier in the future. Our view is that moving from decentralized to centralized is much easier than the other direction.

More Registries!

Anyone can run a Dat registry and you can publish the same dat to multiple registries. Registries with different categories of data or with unique methods of discovering public data will allow for a broad set of uses. Registries can also create distributed hosting and backup services for published dats.

Changelog

Added

  • Improved support for public Dat registries (#794)
  • Add unpublish command
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