I don't think there's much point in discussing this on a *Perl* forum, so I keep it brief. Why are companies like Google and Facebook so successful, and own so much data? They spotted a good idea, reimplemented in an agile way, and had the business model to finance it all.

I came across yacy.net, a P2P search engine, sadly for us written in Java. Although it's been around for a few years, it's still in it's infancy as far as performance and user experience,

See, that's the difference. Google and Facebook were way beyond "the infancy" stage after a few years.

It seems to me that what is a dynamic network of global peer-peer contributors (like us) is much harder to influence than a single huge company with all the political ties that it inevitably has.

Hmmm, and here I am, thinking that one of the problems of Google is, is that is hard to influence. Now you want something that's even harder to influence?

So I am asking my fellow monks, what experience does Perl and the Perl community have on P2P applications and what is there out there that we can draw on in our own development.

A few questions

1. Why is your idea tied to Perl? If your goal is "freedom of censorship" (whatever that may mean), why aren't you agnostic when it comes to language while searching for a solution? Why would anyone but a handful of your users care which language was used? Heck, I don't even care which languages Perlmonks depends on (very likely C as one of the languages, and either Perl and/or PHP as additional languages). For the user, it's all about the service provided, and (s)he doesn't care about the code.
2. Why do you think "P2P" is the answer? (And to what is it the answer?)
3. Now, suppose you know how to create your solution. (Perhaps CPAN is going to have all the answers). How are you going to finance it? What's your business model? Who's going to pay for the datacenters you'll need? Who's going to pay the people maintaining (and initially, developing) all this?

---

---

• Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
• Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:

  <code> <a> <b> <big> <blockquote> <br /> <dd> <dl> <dt> <em> <font> <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> <hr /> <i> <li> <nbsp> <ol> <p> <small> <strike> <strong> <sub> <sup> <table> <td> <th> <tr> <tt> <u> <ul>

• Snippets of code should be wrapped in <code> tags not <pre> tags. In fact, <pre> tags should generally be avoided. If they must be used, extreme care should be taken to ensure that their contents do not have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor intervention).
• Want more info? How to link or How to display code and escape characters are good places to start.