Small suggestion, maybe you should send a “key down” notice when you begin recording, that generates a subtle sound on the receiving end. This would act as something like a typing indicator on a text messaging client.

there are ways to help with lag a bit, you can choose the number of hops a HS uses when meeting up. but of course that comes with downsides

Sorry if I was unclear, this stuff does get tangled, lol. I was talking about setting up a parallel veilid connection - a private route exchange between the two ends that goes straight over the veilid network, outside of tor. It's got comparable privacy and security assurance. There only a few thousand nodes/peers right now, but it's gaining steam.

You could use tor to anchor a common relay, then do key and route exchange to establish veilid, then the realtime app uses that for a very secure private route unique to the two endpoints.

From what I can tell, because of the design, veilid would be excellent, comparable to many commercial voip offerings, with 150-500ms latency . More nodes and users would quickly ramp that up. There are a ton of downstream benefits of something like this; faster file exchange for ipfs, bittorent, etc, that doesn't gum up the tor layer, a kind of implicit defense in depth, but also low latency, efficient peer to peer routing.

It'd almost be zero knowledge by construction; you could build a multi-hop escrow style key exchange.

If Musk integrated tor relays and veilid peers throughout Starlink, you could get near-native latency for wherever you connect in the world, more than enough to add timing attack noise and layer in other security features.