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WebTorrent

webtorrent.io

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Re: WebTorrent

#61
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In 2017 appear.in published some numbers. They saw ~15% were not able to do P2P. https://medium.com/@fippo/what-kind-of-turn-server-is-being- ... Thank you for this. I guess P2P connectivity is more often possible than I thought! For the record, I have tried to form P2P connections with multiple different devices and multiple different network conditions, and although I have been able to achieve connectivity with P…

Tailscale has a really excellent explanation of STUN and NAT Traversal: https://tailscale.com/blog/how-nat-traversal-works/

[deleted]

Re: WebTorrent

#62
For most commonly downloaded torrents, webrtc support is not enough yet, that i know of. While torrent clients like transmission, qbittorrent and rtorrent do not support webrtc it would be difficult to guarantee the spread of this tech that would otherwise be great

Re: WebTorrent

#63

P2P connections over the web are usually not possible due to typical consumer router configurations and bad decisions in the design of WebRTC protocol. The vast majority of these P2P web projects, including WebTorrent, is actually using proxy servers to fake the illusion of P2P connectivity (to be specific, they are using TURN servers to proxy traffic). Here's a stackoverflow question I asked about this and burned a…

Well you usually only need a STUN server that does the NAT hole punching, but transfers no data which can go directly P2P. The problem is that it doesn't work for two people on mobile data where a full TURN is needed. I've never completely understood why exactly it's broken in only that case, but it may have something to do with devices not being directly visible to each other for security reasons.

Or mobile operators being dicks because they can, that's frankly more likely.

Re: WebTorrent

#64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In 2017 appear.in published some numbers. They saw ~15% were not able to do P2P. https://medium.com/@fippo/what-kind-of-turn-server-is-being- ... Thank you for this. I guess P2P connectivity is more often possible than I thought! For the record, I have tried to form P2P connections with multiple different devices and multiple different network conditions, and although I have been able to achieve connectivity with P…

STUN servers are only required for NAT punching, they don’t relay traffic. Only TURN servers are used as relays in the event that a direction connection can’t be established.

I had a mistake in my post where I confused TURN and STUN. It's been a while since I actually tried to do this stuff. The stackoverflow post has details on how I tried to achieve connectivity, if you check that you will see that yes I used STUN.

Re: WebTorrent

#65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...it'll be mainly used for HnRs... Evil work-around: show "file-progress" as % of 2:1 seeding? File isn't 'downloaded' until you have uploaded 2x!

That won't work, you can only mandate at most 1x; otherwise you have more supply than demand and users will never be able to "finish" their downloads

Also from my own experience downloading Linux ISO’s it can often take weeks to share back to a 1:1 ratio. Especially for less popular distros.

Re: WebTorrent

#66
post #19

Oh, huh, I first knew about this from Peertube, and I assumed they were the ones who had created it. It seemed like a really clever solution to the problem of "how do I host my own YouTube without needing a massive infrastructure to deliver video?" Really cool to learn that Webtorrent is a generic API that others can use. There seems to be a lot of good ways it can be used to decentralise the web again.

When exactly do you think the web was "decentralized"? The web the majority has ever interacted with has always lived on someone else's server. Self-hosting has always been rare. It's weird seeing people talk about some mythical history where the web was somehow decentralized.

Decentralized doesn’t mean that every website is distributed to user-local edge servers, it means that there isn't a single point of failure of the web (that is, the web is decentralized, individual sites are still, separately, centralized.)

The emergence of central dominant vendors for key services reduces that (AWS, MS, Google, and CloudFlare are each capable of disabling a lot of the web with a failure; and there are backbone providers that can have similar effects) somewhat, of course.

Re: WebTorrent

#67

P2P connections over the web are usually not possible due to typical consumer router configurations and bad decisions in the design of WebRTC protocol. The vast majority of these P2P web projects, including WebTorrent, is actually using proxy servers to fake the illusion of P2P connectivity (to be specific, they are using TURN servers to proxy traffic). Here's a stackoverflow question I asked about this and burned a…

Well you usually only need a STUN server that does the NAT hole punching, but transfers no data which can go directly P2P. The problem is that it doesn't work for two people on mobile data where a full TURN is needed. I've never completely understood why exactly it's broken in only that case, but it may have something to do with devices not being directly visible to each other for security reasons. Or mobile operator…

> The problem is that it doesn't work for two people on mobile data where a full TURN is needed. I've never completely understood why exactly it's broken in only that case

This is not the only case where it doesn't work. One of the experiments I tried was desktop computer on fixed broadband connecting to another desktop computer on fixed broadband.

Re: WebTorrent

#68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well you usually only need a STUN server that does the NAT hole punching, but transfers no data which can go directly P2P. The problem is that it doesn't work for two people on mobile data where a full TURN is needed. I've never completely understood why exactly it's broken in only that case, but it may have something to do with devices not being directly visible to each other for security reasons. Or mobile operator…

> The problem is that it doesn't work for two people on mobile data where a full TURN is needed. I've never completely understood why exactly it's broken in only that case This is not the only case where it doesn't work. One of the experiments I tried was desktop computer on fixed broadband connecting to another desktop computer on fixed broadband.

Hmm I suppose there may be edge cases where it doesn't work for home networks, but I doubt it's more than a few percent of users. For mobile data it's broken for 100% of devices.

Re: WebTorrent

#69
I want to build a social network, and use a p2p protocol for sharing large files. I know that peertube claimed to use bittorrent, but then it seemed to drop it? What's the catch?

And is ipfs better or worse?

Re: WebTorrent

#70
This would let you Torrent a file download (like Ubuntu of course) in your phones browser, using no data cap instead of using a data capped tether to a computer
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