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IPFS?

We (iroh) don't do birthday paradox hole punching yet. There is some internal debate whether it is worth it.

So if you are in an extremely weird NAT you will fall back to a relay, either our public relays, your own relays rented from us via iroh services, or a self-hosted relay.

But I would argue that a p2p social application that occasionally uses a relay is very much preferable to a centralised app.

The relay is generic internet infrastructure. It just forwards end to end encrypted connections. It can not learn anything about the content.

A relay that is hosted on a non KYC server rented via ZCash would be interesting though if you are super paranoid.

The self-replicating seedbox is a cool idea. Some places offer interest on stable coin deposits. I wonder if there could be a way to set up an account for AI use that would be self-replenishing so long as a budget is maintained.

> You can't build a decentralized social media ecosystem on top. Like Iroh, best to use a central server. So then you have legal liability for your users.

You can, ATProto has the example schematics for how, but it's has a federated rather than distributed architecture, but I don't think "federation" is a hard constraint of the design, more like an implementation detail, and as long as you can do the signalling centrally, to connect the peers, you can do the rest P2P. So sure, legal liability for the connection of peers, but all data transfers would still be directly P2P. AFAIK, Iroh also does "Centralized signaling > P2P data transfers", even when NAT is in the way.

Yes, it's even encouraged. You can either pay for the company behind iroh to host one for you or host your own one.

This is a pretty good idea, it didn't occur to me, I'll try to implement it.

I never tried Iroh in the browser, but supposedly it works (by always using a relay).

I assume individuals have to meet in order to become peers.

Ok nice find! Did you try it?

Taildrop looks good, I didn't know about it.

But it's more for when you already use Tailscale, which relies on a central server and someone who "owns" that network.

In Flipflop you don't need anything besides the app, and each two peers form a "network" of their own, with no owner and no management.

It is better in one way: Taildrop supports iOS.

Better, who knows. Seems different in that Flipflop uses P2P connections directly to the peer, alternatively via other available peers (and initial connection might use central signaling server), while taildrop seems to depend on a tailnet, which is typically hosted by Tailscale (unless you run that yourself).

I guess it's a bit like comparing WeTransfer with Airdrop, one tries to use the network they're on already (internet) where the other favors local-local connections.

iroh is different and more than just a vpn, where you use a bunch of tools together, you can do it all in iroh with one identity, the tunnel, the file transfer, the ssh access, and others. Look at tunnet for example https://github.com/tunnetio/Tunnet to get a better idea.

I have a similar setup. I have my git repos as headless repos in my syncthing folder and use it instead of github.

I also use Syncthing, been using it for many years, it is great

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I've turned discussions on, although we could chat here too

What are discussions?

Iroh networking isn’t available in browser, and presents some cool ways to link things together - i suspect the connection by using iroh is more robust and solid than webrtc, but i’m just guessing.

the tl;dr seems to be simply that it wasn't implemented yet

i've been pretty interested in this as well and got this snippet from chatgpt: `So could Iroh add direct browser-to-native connections without a proxy? Yes, by adding WebRTC support to the native side as well. Iroh’s own browser roadmap describes that approach and identifies the additional native WebRTC stack as a significant dependency cost. It does not describe a fundamental impossibility.`

i may take a stab at adding this functionality soon

Mind sharing the bit about IOT? I'm also looking for a way to get iroh working on something like esp32 for audio streaming. Was wondering if moq can be used here