If you’ve been enjoying the Comet public instance on ElfHosted, there’s a new experimental option you may want to check out...

Thanks to some excellent work from g0ldyy, Comet now supports CometNet — a peer-to-peer network that allows participating Comet instances (public and private) to securely exchange scraped hashes. The design supports encryption, anonymity, trust pools, and reputation, allowing instances to collaborate without blindly trusting one another, and avoiding unnecessary and wasteful duplication of scraping efforts.

We’ve brought up an early CometNet-connected instance at https://cometnet.elfhosted.com

This runs as a separate ElfHosted Comet instance, specifically so we can evaluate CometNet safely without affecting the reliability of the main service.

What this means for you

More search results on the public instance! (soon to be private instances too). Streams discovered on the ElfHosted CometNet instance contribute to the wider CometNet pool, and results found by other trusted CometNet participants can be used to satisfy searches on our side. In practice, that means broader coverage and more potential stream matches.

Right now, ElfHosted Comet and ElfHosted CometNet remain independent. CometNet is still beta and evolving, and we don’t want experimental behavior to impact the stability of https://comet.elfhosted.com.

There’s also a practical safety angle here: ingesting third-party scrape data introduces the possibility of cache poisoning by malicious actors. Keeping CometNet isolated means we can reset or rebuild its database if needed, without touching the primary Comet instance.

If you’re comfortable with bleeding-edge features and want to help shape where this goes, feel free to try the CometNet instance and kick the tyres.

Instance operators and self-hosters who want to participate at a deeper level can reach out for access to the ElfHosted trust pool.

More details on how CometNet works under the hood are available at https://github.com/g0ldyy/comet/tree/main/docs/cometnet

Happy testing! 🚀

(disclosure: This is an AI-refactored rewording of the Reddit announcement, since I didn't want to just copy/paste it!)