The majority of Hyperswarm's code was written before libp2p. We had been sitting on it and waiting for the right time to deploy. We're not against working/merging with libp2p, but since we do like being able to iterate quickly within our team for now.
This project isn't possible in current browsers. Browsers just don't expose the interfaces needed. That's why we work on https://beakerbrowser.com/, which is the main project that Hyperswarm was built for.
The lack of browser support is the biggest stop to getting PWAs to better decentralized/robust-offline.
Stronger PWA support would help a lot, especially in trying to minimize the number of wrappers like Electron and Cordova in the wild.
Certainly most of the interfaces needed aren't high on web platform priorities, and it may not be Beaker's intent yet to push on WHATWG to adopt these technologies more platform-wide, but even the ability to bootstrap the DHT in an ugly, but entirely browser-capable fashion (a dumb REST API bootstrap call to known HTTP endpoints, as one off-the-cuff idea) could do a lot for the kinds of decentralized applications that could be built entirely as PWA with no other application wrapper needed.
libp2p seems to have this goal in mind on their issue tracker, but so far as skimming the issues, I don't think I've seen a timeline for releasing it.
> This project isn't possible in current browsers. Browsers just don't expose the interfaces needed.
While I agree on the networking front, with pluggable bidirectional networking impl that others can write, the DHT still has value.
I am familiar w/ the Beaker project and definitely appreciate all of y'all's work (I did a much smaller PoC back in the day [0] when I thought MaidSafe had legs). I also definitely understand/appreciate the simplicity of some of the hyperswarm code and also understand fears of overabstraction for external use cases.
This project isn't possible in current browsers. Browsers just don't expose the interfaces needed. That's why we work on https://beakerbrowser.com/, which is the main project that Hyperswarm was built for.