What is hyperdrive and how is that different from dat?

Question

I've been trying to get into dat recently and I'm wondering about the difference between dat and the hyperdrive module.

Answer 1

TL;DR: Dat is for end users and Hyperdrive for developers.

Dat is a user friendly interface for sharing distributed files. Anyone can download the program and use it to securely share files peer-to-peer.

Under the hood it uses Hyperdrive which is a Node.js package that aims to implement the same APIs as Node.js' core fs module, but it also offers data replication features.

There also is a dat-node module to use Dat's features in your own Node.js applications. With dat-node it is even easier than with Hyperdrive (just a little less flexible) to connect your own Node.js application to the distributed network.

If you compare the documentation of Hyperdrive and dat-node you'll quickly spot the simplified interface which dat-node provides.

Answer 2

2020 Update: Main points From Paul Frazee's Changing to "Hyper" and the future of the Dat ecosystem

1. The dat-protocol is now the hypercore-protocol
2. dat:// URLs are now hyper:// URLs
3. Hypercore-protocol has new governance led by Matthias Buus
4. "Dat" now a "consortium/collective/community interested in all things decentralisation/local-first/peer-to-peer"

Also I've noticed the term hyper* being used to broadly describe the suite of modules/abstractions related to the hypercore protocol (e.g. hyperspace, hyperswarm, hyperdrive).