Quick intro: Hi, I'm Josh - I've recently joined the IPMJS project to contribute towards the eventual goal of having a viable decentralized npm alt.

In order to jumpstart the development of ipmjs, we're going be forking over yarn and building on their foundations with IPFS as the P2P protocol. The core goals of the project are:

• Maintain backwards compatibility with npm and npm based scripts
• Secure users against malicious scripts (allowing users to do code reviews before executing anything untrusted)
• Create a type of truststore for trusted package maintainers/certain package versions
• Offer users the ability to use 3rd party truststores
• Provide decentralized package search functionality

Currently, the architecture looks like this:

• a CLI client which interacts with the underlying IPFS service
• a helper service in conjunction with the IPFS service to provide search services

For the search service, we're gonna be usingOrbit to create a pubsub channel where clients can send a search request. From there, other clients grab the query and search their own internal search index and return anything they find back.