Johan Bové

Great article, especially from my point of view of being a Surface Pro 4 user since 2014, I can relate as well.
But I'm not like you. For my day job we got issued powerful Macbooks with i9 CPUs and 32GB or RAM and there are no complaints there, perhaps except for that these machines are almost completely locked down and I don't dare doing anything personal on it.
So I only use the Surface for my light-weight after-hours dabbling and messing around with shell scripts and JavaScript code. The only times I really see it struggle is when I'm running Beaker Browser and Patchwork and Syncthing at the same time. But I learned to be patient and just keep one thing open at a time. And I don't do Desktop Apps. I wished I could learn how to program that. Getting some inspiration from the people over dabbling with Gemini and Go and Rust, there's even a really cool client programmed in C.

My question though: would Microsoft allow you to build Windows 10 for x86–64 in their fancy Azure Cloud? Perhaps that's what they are aiming for? Would that be an option?

Since the p2p network relies on people hosting and seeding I do see how a "boolean flag" for checking if the visitor is "hosting" would be a nice thing to have for some hyperdrive owners have put a lot of effort in gathering and publishing their content on the network.

And therefore I could understand that this could be used as a form of "paywall" to control the access to "freemium" content. I think this would be only fair if used in moderation. To call it "extortion", is a bit exaggerated as the whole network literally depends on us sharing each others content.

However, there are indeed privacy related issues. This API, together with our public IP addresses could be used to create a way for some hyperdrive owners to start tracking their visitors.

If the "gratitude" feature would be part of the main Beaker interface, within Sharing Hyperdrives, I will leave open here.

Perhaps it should be made "optional" for the visitors, within the permissions dialog, to disclose to the owner of the hyperdrives to announce that they are hosting the drive or not. Beaker browser itself should not show any explicit banners or notifications. That would be up for the hyperdrive owners to interpret.

Technically, I would even add a datetime stamp so there are more variants possible in how the hyperdrive owner can process is visitors are seeding or not.

@MVD_Vandie Not sure if @Gatewaybrowser will support dat:// too. If not, it can probably be added. A mobile hyperdrive client is really something we need for widespread adoption of hyperdrive and dat sites and drives. The fact that Gatewaybrowser supports the Beaker API is really cool as it means all apps "made for desktop" will work "on mobile" too.