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Holepunch Unveils P2P Platform "Pear Runtime"

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Re: Holepunch Unveils P2P Platform "Pear Runtime"

#11

Post by Uptrenda »

humbleferret wrote: post #9

I've been following Holepunch developments for a while. There does not seem too much publicly available about who's building with it, but I personally regularly use Holepunch's Keet[1] for video calls with friends in parts of the world with censored Internet. I'm able to chat with voice and image quality surpassing anything else I've used. [1] https://keet.io/

It's frigging cool. It's super hard to make a meaningful model for p2p applications because they need all kinds of data structures that are research tier or have scarce real-world data. It's not just connectivity that's hard. If they manage to do everything decentralized and create meaningful constructs. This could be the start of actually realizing all the rhetoric these kind of projects have been promising. This seems to have technical merit, imo.

Re: Holepunch Unveils P2P Platform "Pear Runtime"

#12

Post by chatmasta »

Uptrenda wrote: post #7
altruios wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

mobile platforms have some unique challenges for P2P stuff, from what I looked into back in the day. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/200753717_Challenge... (from 2009) P2P stuff is really hard.

I'm guessing its due to the NATs they use. Carrier-grade NATs with made-up IPs and symmetric NATs. You can have some kind of options for symmetric NATs. But I'm not too sure about carrier-grade NATs yet as I've never even written code for this yet.

You'll face a lot of those problems on residential ISP connections too. The bigger issue with mobile devices is that they're roaming between towers, so there are frequent changes to the network topology. But p2p networks usually require a long-ish bootstrapping step that might not even finish by the time the physical network shifts underneath it. (Tor bootstrapping takes on the order of ~30 seconds, for example.) As the linked paper notes, this is disruptive not only to the local client, but also to the rest of the network that needs to re-learn (and re-propagate) the location of mobile peers.

Re: Holepunch Unveils P2P Platform "Pear Runtime"

#13

Post by diggan »

Uptrenda wrote: post #11
humbleferret wrote: post #9

I've been following Holepunch developments for a while. There does not seem too much publicly available about who's building with it, but I personally regularly use Holepunch's Keet[1] for video calls with friends in parts of the world with censored Internet. I'm able to chat with voice and image quality surpassing anything else I've used. [1] https://keet.io/

It's frigging cool. It's super hard to make a meaningful model for p2p applications because they need all kinds of data structures that are research tier or have scarce real-world data. It's not just connectivity that's hard. If they manage to do everything decentralized and create meaningful constructs. This could be the start of actually realizing all the rhetoric these kind of projects have been promising. This se…

Feels like creating small, ephemeral groups is an easier part of p2p too, so it fits that particular use case well.

Re: Holepunch Unveils P2P Platform "Pear Runtime"

#14

Post by api »

Uptrenda wrote: post #7
altruios wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

mobile platforms have some unique challenges for P2P stuff, from what I looked into back in the day. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/200753717_Challenge... (from 2009) P2P stuff is really hard.

I'm guessing its due to the NATs they use. Carrier-grade NATs with made-up IPs and symmetric NATs. You can have some kind of options for symmetric NATs. But I'm not too sure about carrier-grade NATs yet as I've never even written code for this yet.

No it's mostly the battery limitations.

Keeping links open P2P requires keepalive because NATs will time out. Even with IPv6 there are usually stateful firewalls in the way that will time out. This means you're constantly sending little packets, and if you have a lot of links there's a lot of keep alive cycles that have to be serviced. This keeps radios and baseband hardware from being able to sleep, draining the battery faster.

Mobile devices almost always have IPv6 on cell networks these days, which makes the actual hole punching almost 100% successful.

Re: Holepunch Unveils P2P Platform "Pear Runtime"

#15

Post by rockooooo »

humbleferret wrote: post #10
treyd wrote: post #3

> Created by Holepunch, a Tether-backed company Is this the same Tether as in the USDT stablecoin that's been accused of pumping up the volume in Bitcoin markets and possibly being secretly insolvent?

Genuine curiosity: What's the issue with a company being backed by Tether? I understand that, as it stands today, Holepunch appears to be operated or contributed to by several staff members from Bitfinex and Tether. However, if Holepunch is open source and Tether were to implode, Holepunch would still exist and could be adopted by anyone, irrespective of Tether/Bitfinex, etc., correct?

Open-source projects where all the developers work for one company tend not to do too well when that company dies, especially if there isn't a large ecosystem around the software yet.

Re: Holepunch Unveils P2P Platform "Pear Runtime"

#16

Post by dmotz »

This looks exciting and I'm pleased to see more and more frictionless ways of making p2p apps. I've been building a somewhat similar hobby project [1] that aims to connect peers in the browser by piggybacking on open protocols out on the net (BitTorrent, MQTT, Nostr, IPFS, etc).

This project seems to be using Hyperswarm which I've looked at for use as a peering medium but it seems like it's not supported in the browser. I'd love to implement it if that story changes since it's so easy to distribute apps on the web.

[1] https://github.com/dmotz/trystero/

Re: Holepunch Unveils P2P Platform "Pear Runtime"

#17

Post by araes »

I totally thought this was an article about a phreaking [1] method of passing P2P messaging using actual hole-punches going pear shaped.

Having now read the actual article, I'm not sure what I actually read. There was so much ad speak, I think it was "disrupting web 2.0 with serverless P2P aps"?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phreaking

Re: Holepunch Unveils P2P Platform "Pear Runtime"

#18

Post by mempko »

Love to see P2P coming back. Back in 2013 I built a P2P application platform called Firestr (https://www.firestr.com) that was targeted as an all in one platform to build and share graphical P2P apps. The apps were built using a built-in collaborative app editor. You could build P2P apps with friends using P2P!

You create a conversation with one or more people and can then launch apps into that conversation. The people on the other side didn't have to have the apps installed. If they liked an app, they can install it with one click and use it in their own conversations. If they wanted to change the app, they can do that too using the built in editor! All across a real-time encrypted p2p channel.

Despite how easy all these new P2P app frameworks are, none of them are as easy as Firestr was.

Example apps

https://github.com/mempko/firestr/tree/master/example_apps

Example p2p drawing application

https://github.com/mempko/firestr/blob/master/example_apps/d...

I've stopped developing it years ago. Maybe I should pick it up again if P2P is becoming interesting again for folks.

Re: Holepunch Unveils P2P Platform "Pear Runtime"

#19

Post by yieldcrv »

treyd wrote: post #3

> Created by Holepunch, a Tether-backed company Is this the same Tether as in the USDT stablecoin that's been accused of pumping up the volume in Bitcoin markets and possibly being secretly insolvent?

you realize the biggest tether controversy involves them being briefly 800% more solvent than banks, instead of 1,000% more solvent than banks?

and we know that because they’ve been investigated by multiple authorities in the US and paid fines for that specific reason?

just making sure we are on the same page about the controversy

Re: Holepunch Unveils P2P Platform "Pear Runtime"

#20

Post by RockRobotRock »

humbleferret wrote: post #9

I've been following Holepunch developments for a while. There does not seem too much publicly available about who's building with it, but I personally regularly use Holepunch's Keet[1] for video calls with friends in parts of the world with censored Internet. I'm able to chat with voice and image quality surpassing anything else I've used. [1] https://keet.io/

looks great. Pied Piper irl
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