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by tadasv3 hours ago |
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upvoteby nighthawk4542 hours ago|
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> it still needs to bootstrap the connection via central server. I think that always might be a limitation of P2P

I think Iroh has a way of doing it using either DNS or BitTorrent DHT. Not perfect but fairly decentralized

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upvoteby narragansett1 hours ago|
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Iroh's discovery is genuinely neat, and node-IDs-as-public-keys is similar to bitbang.

A browser can't join a DHT though because of no UDP sockets, so the connecting side would need a native client, which is the thing bitbang avoids. And DHT lets you locate the peer, but you still need somewhere to trade SDP and ICE candidates, so the rendezvous stays either way I think.

What I can do is keep the broker small enough that self-hosting is realistic, which is where it is now -- no accounts, no registry, nothing that grants access, only a simple broker.

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upvoteby spl7572 hours ago|
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If you are running this stuff on a cheap VPS with limited bandwidth, you will not want all of your traffic being routed as ingress and egress as that could easily eat your monthly bandwidth limit depending on the size of files and frequency.
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upvoteby narragansett3 hours ago|
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Right, bootstrapping needs a rendezvous point -- that's true of any P2P system, including the wg version. The difference is what the rendezvous knows and costs. Here it holds no accounts, no registry, and nothing that grants access, so it's a phonebook rather than a keyring, and it's out of the data path so it's cheap to run and you can self-host it.

On generalizing: wg wins for "put these machines on one network." WebRTC wins on reach, because the connecting side can be a browser -- a phone, a borrowed laptop, a machine you don't administer -- with nothing installed. A wg jumpbox still needs a client on both ends and a public IP for the box. Different tradeoff rather than a strictly better one.

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