buffer VS trystero

Disclosure: I'm the author of WebTorrent.

It's so fulfilling to see WebTorrent still popping up on Hacker News after all these years. I started the project in 2013 and devoted most of my 20s to working on it, ultimately becoming a full-time open source maintainer, and writing hundreds of npm packages including buffer (https://github.com/feross/buffer), simple-peer (https://github.com/feross/simple-peer), and StandardJS (https://standardjs.com/).

I started WebTorrent with the goal of extending the BitTorrent protocol to become more web-friendly, allowing any browser to become a peer in the torrent network. Within less than a year of starting the project, I got WebTorrent fully working. And it worked _well_, beating many native torrent apps in terms of raw download speed and the ability to stream videos within seconds of adding a torrent.

WebTorrent never got as much attention as the cryptocurrency projects selling tokens throughout the mid-2010s, even though WebTorrent actually worked and had more real users than almost all of them :) I was never tempted to add a crypto-token to WebTorrent, despite many well-meaning friends telling me to do it. Nonetheless, WebTorrent served as an accessible on-ramp to the world of decentralized tech, along with other projects like Dat (https://dat-ecosystem.org/) and Secure Scuttlebutt (https://scuttlebutt.nz/).

But WebTorrent is more than a protocol extension to BitTorrent. We built a popular desktop torrent client, WebTorrent Desktop (https://webtorrent.io/desktop/), which supports powerful features like instant video streaming.

We also build a `webtorrent` JavaScript package (see https://socket.dev/npm/package/webtorrent) which implements the full BitTorrent/WebTorrent protocol in JavaScript. This implementation uses TCP, UDP, and/or WebRTC for peer-to-peer transport in any environment – whether Node.js (TCP/UDP), Electron (TCP/UDP/WebRTC), or the web browser (WebRTC). In the browser, the `webtorrent` package uses WebRTC which doesn’t require a browser plugin, extension, or any kind of installation to work.

If you’re building a website and want to fetch files from a torrent, you can use `webtorrent` to do that directly client-side, in a decentralized manner. The WebTorrent Workshop (https://webtorrent.github.io/workshop/) is helpful for getting started and teaches you how to download and stream a torrent into an HTML page in just 10 lines of code.

Now that WebTorrent is fully supported in nearly all the most popular torrent clients, including uTorrent, dare I say that we succeeded? It's been a long and winding journey, but I'm glad to have played a role in making this happen. Special shoutouts to all the open source contributors over the years, especially Diego R Baquero, Alex Morais,

P.S. If you're curious what I'm up to now, I'm building Socket (https://socket.dev). And there's actually a WebTorrent connection, too. Socket came out of a prior product we built called Wormhole (https://wormhole.app), an end-to-end encrypted file transfer application built using WebTorrent under-the-hood (Show HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26666142). Like Firefox Send before it, security was a primary goal of Wormhole (see security details here: https://wormhole.app/security). But one area where we were lacking was in how we audited our open source dependencies. Like most teams building a JavaScript app, we had a large node_modules folder filled with lots of constantly updating third-party code. The risk of a software supply chain attack was huge, especially with 30% of our visitors coming from China. As most teams do, we enforced code review for all our first-party code. But similar to most teams, we were pulling in third-party dependencies and dependency updates without even glancing at the code (this is something that almost every company does today). We knew we needed to do better for our users. We looked around for a solution to analyze the risk of open source packages but none existed. So we decided to build Socket.

Socket helps developers ship faster and spend less time on security busywork by helping them safely find, audit, and manage OSS. Socket provides a comprehensive open source risk analysis. By analyzing the full picture – from maintainers and how they behave, to open-source codebases and how they evolve – we enable developers and security teams to identify risk from malware, hidden code, typo-squatting, misleading packages, permission creep, unmaintained or abandoned packages, and poor security practices. For one quick example, take a look at the risks we identified in this Angular.js calendar library: https://socket.dev/npm/package/angular-calendar/issues/0.30....

If someone is a web dev this could probably explain this better than me but here it goes. This does NOT mean Feross has ANYTHING to do with the site. Feross published an open-source module (https://github.com/feross/buffer) for node.js that this site happens to use. There is likely 0 relation between the website and Feross considering that thousands of other websites use this module.

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/

I was going to mention WebRTC! It seems designed for video calling, but there are lots of cool use cases - I recently ran across https://github.com/dmotz/trystero , a dead simple WebRTC library for peer-to-peer multiplayer browser games.

I strongly endorse Trystero (https://github.com/dmotz/trystero) for enabling P2P communication in web apps. It’s open source and leverages public infrastructure for matchmaking.

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https://github.com/dmotz/trystero

Nice work! Any reason one might use this over https://github.com/dmotz/trystero, you think?

Yes, this is a major issue that I haven't found a real solution for. There seems to be a mixture of iOS Safari bugs and intentional design limitations at play, and I don't know if a fully P2P web app like Chitchatter is practical on that platform. There's an open issue to improve this in Trystero (the networking library that Chitchatter uses), but there may be a limit to how stable iOS will be with WebRTC apps. 😕

You can use Trystero (https://github.com/dmotz/trystero) to cut server costs to zero. That’s what I used to build https://chitchatter.im/, which supports P2P audio and video calls.

WebTorrent is obviously well suited for p2p file distribution, but using a minimal subset of the protocol also provides a nice hack for easily bootstrapping peer connections between web app users. Piggybacking on public mediums already designed to do peer exchange can let you rapidly prototype a WebRTC project without the hassle of running your own server anywhere.

I built a library that explores this idea: https://github.com/dmotz/trystero