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Comment by madez | Hacker News Reader

To go a bit more off-topic here, It isn't obligatory that decentralized p2p platforms manage network obstacles badly nor that you even connect to random strangers at all.

When RetroShare was still in the Debian repositories, I managed to establish fast and direct connections with my peers, and only my peers, especially after forwarding a port.

Meanwhile the (outdated) version of Syncthing in Debian only connects through a relay which limits its speed and is a problem for privacy. For chat, there is Jami (outdated, too) and Tox.

It looks like most of these problems are because of a lack of people working on them, and possibly misaligned incentives. The technical issues are secondary.

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It can be done, but NAT traversal is hard, and somewhat flaky since not every firewall implements NAT exactly the same. I think Skype did NAT traversal in the early days, and eventually gave up and switched to media proxying for these reasons.

Throw in dynamic IP addresses, and it doesn't make things any easier.

Nerds can just set up DDNS and a port forward. Grandma probably can't.

Have you tried https://samy.pl/pwnat/ ?

I've implemented the same paper. It's fun, but not Grandma-ready.

Changing IPs can be dealt with network-wide DHT or a known-peer approach.

The NAT traversal shenanigans only have to be successful on one side. When the geek manages to be reachable, they can talk to their grandparent, given they use software that tries to connect them, like RetroShare.

This doesn't cover all cases, but enough to be useful and valuable.

I'd posit that the reason everything gets jammmed through HTTP/HTTPS/SMTP/POP/IMAP/DNS now is that those are the only things we can reliably get through every firewall.

Home firewalls are easy. Most already have UPNP or NAT-PMP enabled, so the app can easily poke holes--even in TCP! Corporate ones (people procrastinating at work is a fat chunk of internet traffic) will have all kinds of ad-hoc rules that struck the network guy's fancy at the time.

For a truly P2P net (grandma-to-grandma), one side isn't enough.

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