And here are the actually interesting parts:

https://docs.datproject.org/how-dat-works

https://github.com/datproject/docs/blob/master/docs/hyperdri...

Seems very similar to BitTorrent, but without trackers, with Content Defined Chunking (instead of Fixed Size Chunking) and utilizing Merkle trees + public key cryptography to enable append-only operations on shared data sets (rather than 'read-only once published').

Thanks for the links, here are a few more you may find interesting:

In progress paper - https://github.com/datproject/docs/blob/master/papers/dat-pa...

Dat protocol site - https://www.datprotocol.com/

If this lets me download specific files inside a shared folder instead of syncing the entire thing it would probably be the best sharing tool so far.

Yes! Dat protocol supports syncing only the data you want, including storing all history or only the latest content. We just need to get the UI added for this in the desktop app & CLI.

What are the differences between this and librevault?

Not very familiar with librevault, but on a cursory glance the design seems fairly consistent (p2p, encryption, offline support).

However, Dat has put a lot of focus into developing an ecosystem to build applications on top of the protocol. This is making awesome things like Beaker Browser[0] and peer-npm possible [1].

[0] - https://beakerbrowser.com/ [1] - https://github.com/noffle/peer-npm