Nice idea, but for personal sharing between my devices, I have a syncthing folder that's synced between my laptop, phone and media center/NAS, and I've been finding that most of my day to day files have been migrating into it, and I hardly ever use things outside of it.
This actually looks good and uses the established Iroh.
Nice idea with the browser link to share with devices that dont have flipflop on the same LAN. This would be a killer if this would also work via internet!
Not sure if Iroh can run in the browser though.
Interesting project, towards a decentralized Internet!
The heavy lifting is done in this function, pairing. You link your personal devices together, solid idea [0].
This Flipflop project relies on the Iroh library for NAT/Firewall puncturing, external address discovery and overlay networking. Connecting two 5G devices, without a coordinating central server is possible, but very hard. Iroh simply relies on a server which you could self-host. Cool stuff, we stress tested it a while ago and it somewhat worked.
NAT connectivity is unsolved. My university lab conducted one of the bigger puncturing studies a decade ago [1]. Recently, we also bought 40+ or something 4G and 5G SIM cards in Europe for puncturing [2]. My master student traveled Europe by bus to get these local SIM cards. He worked day-and-night to connect these weird symmetric 5G NAT filter boxes and got it working. Simple sync collision and birthday paradox brute force... It all works sometimes, but insufficiently reliable for mass-adoption. You can't build a decentralized social media ecosystem on top. Like Iroh, best to use a central server. So then you have legal liability for your users. Unless an AI agent buys the server fully autonomously using Bitcoin, next years students got that working[3] :-)
We (iroh) don't do birthday paradox hole punching yet. There is some internal debate whether it is worth it.
So if you are in an extremely weird NAT you will fall back to a relay, either our public relays, your own relays rented from us via iroh services, or a self-hosted relay.
But I would argue that a p2p social application that occasionally uses a relay is very much preferable to a centralised app.
The relay is generic internet infrastructure. It just forwards end to end encrypted connections. It can not learn anything about the content.
A relay that is hosted on a non KYC server rented via ZCash would be interesting though if you are super paranoid.
Iroh networking isn’t available in browser, and presents some cool ways to link things together - i suspect the connection by using iroh is more robust and solid than webrtc, but i’m just guessing.
But iroh is designed bare metal first, we currently support the browser via WASM, but only with relay mode.
We will solve browser eventually, but I think it is a mistake to build peer to peer tech browser first. We think it is better to make it extremely efficient on bare metal first, and then grow into the restricted browser ecosystem where possible.
Nice idea, but for personal sharing between my devices, I have a syncthing folder that's synced between my laptop, phone and media center/NAS, and I've been finding that most of my day to day files have been migrating into it, and I hardly ever use things outside of it.
This actually looks good and uses the established Iroh.
Nice idea with the browser link to share with devices that dont have flipflop on the same LAN. This would be a killer if this would also work via internet! Not sure if Iroh can run in the browser though.
Is it better/different than https://tailscale.com/docs/features/taildrop ?
Interesting project, towards a decentralized Internet!
The heavy lifting is done in this function, pairing. You link your personal devices together, solid idea [0].
This Flipflop project relies on the Iroh library for NAT/Firewall puncturing, external address discovery and overlay networking. Connecting two 5G devices, without a coordinating central server is possible, but very hard. Iroh simply relies on a server which you could self-host. Cool stuff, we stress tested it a while ago and it somewhat worked.
NAT connectivity is unsolved. My university lab conducted one of the bigger puncturing studies a decade ago [1]. Recently, we also bought 40+ or something 4G and 5G SIM cards in Europe for puncturing [2]. My master student traveled Europe by bus to get these local SIM cards. He worked day-and-night to connect these weird symmetric 5G NAT filter boxes and got it working. Simple sync collision and birthday paradox brute force... It all works sometimes, but insufficiently reliable for mass-adoption. You can't build a decentralized social media ecosystem on top. Like Iroh, best to use a central server. So then you have legal liability for your users. Unless an AI agent buys the server fully autonomously using Bitcoin, next years students got that working[3] :-)
[0] https://github.com/andunieee/flipflop/blob/62bb498520aacb60e...
[1] UDP NAT and Firewall Puncturing in the Wild, https://inria.hal.science/hal-01597969v1/document
[2] Mass Adoption of NATs: Survey and experiments on carrier-grade NATs, https://arxiv.org/html/2311.04658v2
[3] Self-replicating seedbox servers using programmable money, https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.05431
We (iroh) don't do birthday paradox hole punching yet. There is some internal debate whether it is worth it.
So if you are in an extremely weird NAT you will fall back to a relay, either our public relays, your own relays rented from us via iroh services, or a self-hosted relay.
But I would argue that a p2p social application that occasionally uses a relay is very much preferable to a centralised app.
The relay is generic internet infrastructure. It just forwards end to end encrypted connections. It can not learn anything about the content.
A relay that is hosted on a non KYC server rented via ZCash would be interesting though if you are super paranoid.
Keeping the tunnel available between sends is the nice part. Once it's set up with someone, you can just use it.
Can you talk a bit about the performance characteristics? What's the max throughput? How does that change with latency and jitter?
Why native code?
I would think this could be done completely in the browser using WebRTC?
Iroh networking isn’t available in browser, and presents some cool ways to link things together - i suspect the connection by using iroh is more robust and solid than webrtc, but i’m just guessing.
There are some projects that implement an iroh webrtc custom transport that works in the browser. E.g. https://iroh-webrtc-demo.datei.jetzt/#?addpeer=fd4341f14b4eb...
But iroh is designed bare metal first, we currently support the browser via WASM, but only with relay mode.
We will solve browser eventually, but I think it is a mistake to build peer to peer tech browser first. We think it is better to make it extremely efficient on bare metal first, and then grow into the restricted browser ecosystem where possible.
Browsers are very restricted environments.
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