291–300 of 488 posts
IE could I get an app on my phone, to talk to anyone on the planet with that app directly without having to trust any middlemen like Apple, Google, WhatsApp etc?
Could people have something like original facebook, but without Meta because of actual p2p?
> Dial keys Maybe it's in the video I didn't watch, but I really think paragraph one should make clear what kind of keys and why. Cryptographic? Asymmetric? How do they do the job, at even the most basic level? It never explains, just dives into abstract claims of superiority and usage stats. I gather relays are involved; this would be a good thing to mention right away instead of making me sift it from the HN discus…
> Dial keys. Not IPs. > It's a simple idea really, and it's the right abstraction for the future of the internet. IP addresses can break, without warning, and it's outside of your device's control. Keys, however, are created & controlled by you. They stay the same as your device moves, and are yours to throw away, or not. IP addresses can be private and inaccessible behind firewalls, but with iroh your device can be…
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VPNs do not allow you to connect two devices directly, they have to go through the VPN. They also do not allow you to connect devices that are not on the VPN. Iroh does P2P connections and punches holes through NATs when needed, so you can connect directly to devices on different networks that are behind firewalls.
> VPNs do not allow you to connect two devices directly, they have to go through the VPN Not true. Depends on the VPN protocol.
Sounds great to me, and would be a boon for self-hosting and decentralization in general, which is sorely needed considering how captured, authoritarian, and anti civil liberties every democracy is becoming. If I'm not mistaken, I believe I read a tailscale blog about them envisioning application layer embedding at some point as well.
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I made a demo showing it work: https://hw-e4592d7e.web.hallway.com/
It doesn't seem to do anything when you click Run Live, besides updating the status to "Connecting to DERP relay, exchanging endpoint info..."
If you're new to Iroh, my mental model is roughly "Tailscale at the application layer instead of the network layer". If your question is, "why not just use Tailscale?", look at it from an app developer's perspective. If you want to release an app and have instances of your app be able to easily connect to each other, you could theoretically embeded Tailscale functionality into your app, but then the users of your app…
I've been drawing a lot of inspiration from Iroh, while working on my own https://github.com/connet-dev/connet. While peers in connet communicate peer to peer, I have a long way to cover peer discovery and transparent connection migration.
"Tailscale at the application layer, instead of the network layer" (as sibling comment describes it) is a great way of thinking about it. In my mind, with the right apps, Iroh (and connet) could really democratize secure self-hosting.
I am one of the iroh developers. A question that frequently comes up: when will iroh support webrtc, or BLE, or LoRa, or ... Iroh as of now supports only IPv4, IPv6 and relay transports out of the box. There is such a large variety of potentially interesting transports out there that we can't support all of them without turning the codebase into an unmaintainable maze of feature flags. But we have added the ability t…
This would give you a native iroh node that also speaks webrtc but I find that what folks want is for browsers to participate as peers.
I build p2claw, p2p for self-hosted web apps, and ended up doing both halves separately. Box to box is iroh, although I use my own coordinator service and run my own iroh relay. Browser to box is webrtc with a service worker that makes the browser act like a peer. The worker grabs fetches and sends them as HTTP frames over the data channel, the box answers on localhost. The browser bit has to be webrtc because it's the only browser api does ICE.
Wiring up the iroh half went smoothly, very much enjoying working with the library. Congrats on 1.0!
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DNS isn't decentralised it's more federated. I believe Iroh has the option to use DHT here, last I looked at least.
Exactly. We use DNS TXT records for our default address lookup system. But we also support fully p2p address lookup via the mainline DHT. And if you have another suitable system, you can also plug it in. E.g. you might want to use another DHT that allows mapping from a key to some address data.
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Iroh is QUIC. We are not trying to reinvent the wheel here, just combining existing IETF RFCs in a creative way. Here is a concrete problem we solve. You have one device in your home WLAN behind a NAT. Your other device is in a 4g network, or behind another NAT at work. In most cases we can give you a direct connection between the two devices very quickly via hole punching, so you get the highest possible bandwidth a…
So iroh is basically WebRTC, except it works in and outside of a browser. Relays seems quite similar to TURN/STUN servers except they also handle fallback traffic much like TOR guard/relay nodes
For browser / webapps you want webrtc.