Mainline DHT

Pubky uses BitTorrent’s Mainline distributed hash table through PKARR to discover where a public key’s services are hosted. Application data lives on Homeservers; the DHT holds the discovery records.

Discovery records require periodic republishing to remain available. The underlying storage protocol is specified in BEP 44. For the Rust implementation, usage, and operational limitations, see the Mainline README.

Cloud network reachability

Direct DHT access has shown low reachability on some AWS and GCP deployments: lookups can miss records and publication can reach too few peers, even when joining the network succeeds. The reported failures and reachability investigation have not established a single cause.

PKARR relays can provide a path through another network, provided the relay itself has working DHT connectivity. Relay clients can also encounter timeouts during uncached lookups. See the PKARR backend configuration guide for choosing direct DHT access, relays, or both.