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Make any site multiplayer in a few lines. Serverless WebRTC matchmaking

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21–30 of 71 posts

Re: Make any site multiplayer in a few lines. Serverless WebRTC matchmaking

#21
post #10

Just a reminder that this kind of user-to-user interaction feature makes your website a "social network" according to UK regulation (and Mississippi's, and more jurisdictions coming soon), and therefore you must get copies of government ID of your users so that you can deny them access if they are underage, and rattle them to the police if you suspect they are committing thought crime by sending certain fruits. Obey…

This is factually untrue and either venting or wilfully ignorant of the actual law.

Re: Make any site multiplayer in a few lines. Serverless WebRTC matchmaking

#22
post #15
post #10

Just a reminder that this kind of user-to-user interaction feature makes your website a "social network" according to UK regulation (and Mississippi's, and more jurisdictions coming soon), and therefore you must get copies of government ID of your users so that you can deny them access if they are underage, and rattle them to the police if you suspect they are committing thought crime by sending certain fruits. Obey…

Do those laws even apply to P2P apps without central servers?

They do, but unlike what the OP claims, you do not need to age verify your site just because you added a social element. If the purpose is not to distribute pornography/other age restricted materials and you are able to moderate the site (ie: are not facebook scale), this is not required.

The law sucks but the misinformation around it is getting out of hand.

Re: Make any site multiplayer in a few lines. Serverless WebRTC matchmaking

#23
post #8

This isn't serverless. It's just using someone else's servers for the SDP signaling. And in a production app you'd likely also need turn servers and maybe SFU servers. There are some true serverless approaches out there for the signaling, e.g. where both peers scan each other's QR code, but that obviously has very limited use.

serverless nowadays means "no server in YOUR infrastructure"

Re: Make any site multiplayer in a few lines. Serverless WebRTC matchmaking

#24
post #8

This isn't serverless. It's just using someone else's servers for the SDP signaling. And in a production app you'd likely also need turn servers and maybe SFU servers. There are some true serverless approaches out there for the signaling, e.g. where both peers scan each other's QR code, but that obviously has very limited use.

I didn't know about the QR-Code solution how does it work ?

Re: Make any site multiplayer in a few lines. Serverless WebRTC matchmaking

#25
post #24
post #8

This isn't serverless. It's just using someone else's servers for the SDP signaling. And in a production app you'd likely also need turn servers and maybe SFU servers. There are some true serverless approaches out there for the signaling, e.g. where both peers scan each other's QR code, but that obviously has very limited use.

I didn't know about the QR-Code solution how does it work ?

Normally you need a "lobby" server that collects and lists available other clients and pass along connection details. You have no servers in P2P setup, so the "signaling" information has to be shared "out-of-band", like through QR code or super secret invite link or avian IPv4 or something.

Re: Make any site multiplayer in a few lines. Serverless WebRTC matchmaking

#26
post #8

This isn't serverless. It's just using someone else's servers for the SDP signaling. And in a production app you'd likely also need turn servers and maybe SFU servers. There are some true serverless approaches out there for the signaling, e.g. where both peers scan each other's QR code, but that obviously has very limited use.

They say that serverless stacks have the highest server bills.

Re: Make any site multiplayer in a few lines. Serverless WebRTC matchmaking

#27
post #10

Just a reminder that this kind of user-to-user interaction feature makes your website a "social network" according to UK regulation (and Mississippi's, and more jurisdictions coming soon), and therefore you must get copies of government ID of your users so that you can deny them access if they are underage, and rattle them to the police if you suspect they are committing thought crime by sending certain fruits. Obey…

This is factually untrue and either venting or wilfully ignorant of the actual law.

Hm? Have you taken a look at the law?

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2023/50/section/12

What's even "harmful content to minors"? Even if it were restricted only to pornography--which is not--I wouldn't count with being able to "moderate" all the ways users can draw penises.

The act regulates "user-to-user" services:

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2023/50/section/3

> In this Act “user-to-user service” means an internet service by means of which content that is generated directly on the service by a user of the service, or uploaded to or shared on the service by a user of the service, may be encountered by another user, or other users, of the service.

The legal text is dense but there is some analysis here:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/09/uk-online-safety-bill-...

And some news about Reddit: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/08/americans-be-warned-le...

Re: Make any site multiplayer in a few lines. Serverless WebRTC matchmaking

#29

It'd be cool if you could easily publish multiplayers games to itch.io or similar websites from Godot or Unity and have automatic matchmaking: the first player to visit the game pages gets matched automatically with the next, and so on. Is there anything like that?

I've been looking for this too!

I'd love to use an existing protocol to get (distributed?) user accounts and chat and stuff, and just build my game as a plugin for that. Or something.

Re: Make any site multiplayer in a few lines. Serverless WebRTC matchmaking

#30
post #19
post #8

This isn't serverless. It's just using someone else's servers for the SDP signaling. And in a production app you'd likely also need turn servers and maybe SFU servers. There are some true serverless approaches out there for the signaling, e.g. where both peers scan each other's QR code, but that obviously has very limited use.

I've always been obsessed with true P2P WebRTC with QR codes but, at least back in the day, Firefox fails the offer under a very short timeout (~5 secs IIRC) which made out of band signaling completely impossible.

I have done this a couple of weeks ago on firefox and it worked fine even with a 1 minute delay. An even easier way to share the SDP offer, at laest when the clients are in physical proximity, is using a data over sound library like ggwave.
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