chitchatter VS trystero

If you haven't seen it before, Chitchatter is an open source web app that instantly enables private, anonymous communication between people. Once connected you can easily chat, share audio and video, and transfer files. All communication is encrypted and peer-to-peer.

You could conceivably self-host https://github.com/jeremyckahn/chitchatter (a web-based chat app I made that supports audio calls) and configure it to use a locally-hosted WebTorrent server to connect peers.

Yes, but I plan on adding a feature to enable message authors to rescind their messages: https://github.com/jeremyckahn/chitchatter/issues/11

Thank you! I would definitely appreciate some help with the file sharing functionality. I've got a placeholder ticket for that at https://github.com/jeremyckahn/chitchatter/issues/21, so please comment there if that's something you'd like to work on.

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