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I built an ephemeral P2P chat with WebRTC, without servers

13 points

by zRinexD

2 hours ago

| past

| 7 comments

| ephemchat.vercel.app

| HN

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nikisweeting

35 minutes ago

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THis is not without servers, you still use a signaling server for TURN.

If you want true serverless you need a side channel to copy the offer/response, e.g. tell the user's to copy paste them as base64 thorugh whatsapp manually or something (https://github.com/pirate/webrtcchat).

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iamnothere

13 minutes ago

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Matrix was once working on something similar, I wonder what the latest status is.

In general, things like this are a great way around current pushes for age verification and mandatory surveillance. Give your friends a link to this, or even a web archive via USB stick, and chat directly without intermediaries. No need to run a server.

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elwebmaster

41 minutes ago

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You should mention that it uses PeerJS. That's not without servers. PeerJS runs their own signaling server which you are relying on to connect your peers.

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zRinexD

2 hours ago

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I wanted to be able to talk to anyone in the world without relying on any company's servers. No censorship, no rules, no limits except the ones I set in my own room. So I built this.

No signup, no registration. Just create a room with a password, share the code, and anyone can join directly. Everything is peer-to-peer, ephemeral, and disappears when you close the tab.

Would love to hear what you think. Code is open source. Link: https://ephemchat.vercel.app/ Source code: https://github.com/zzrinexd/EphemChat

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ranger_danger

1 hour ago

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Many users in the world are behind CGNAT or symmetrical NAT, and if both sides are, they will not be able to use WebRTC unless there is a TURN relay server involved. Does your software have a way to account for this?

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zRinexD

44 minutes ago

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Great question! Currently it uses Google's public STUN servers, which works for ~85% of connections. For the remaining cases, I'm planning to add a community-maintained list of TURN servers or a P2P fallback mechanism.

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iamnothere

8 minutes ago

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You could look into DHT as a way to distribute info about connected nodes, and maybe nodes with the right firewall setup could opt in to being TURN servers.

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atmanactive

1 hour ago

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This is great, thanks! Would you accept a Github pull request to translate it to English and several other languages?

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zRinexD

44 minutes ago

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Absolutely! I'd love to make this accessible to everyone. English translation would be a great start. Let's coordinate on GitHub issues.

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indigodaddy