I had been hoping to begin distributing image files for the Freedombone project via the Dat protocol earlier in the year, before the 3.1 release, but at the time other things were more of a priority. Recently I returned to investigating how to do that, and there is now Dat version of the website and downloadable images. If you have the dat command installed then downloading an image is just a matter of doing a "dat clone [link]", similar to cloning a git repo.

The peer-to-peer nature of dat means that this method of distributng large files (typically about 3GB each in compressed format) is a lot more scalable than just directly downloading from one not very powerful server. Like git, the data is content addressable and can be seeded by arbitrary numbers of peers so it doesn't have to reside in any one place. The more peers there are the faster downloads can happen, and being distributed provides some amount of censorship resistance.

So dat will be the preferred distribution method for image files in future. The previous method worked, but my server did struggle sometimes and I had to stop downloads of images happening via the onion address because it was saturating Tor's bandwidth limits.

There are other interesting possibilities for dat which I'll also try. I don't know if git repos can be hosted via dat, but doing remote backups using it would be quite feasible and perhaps better than the existing implementation in Freedombone.