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Comment by Jhsto | Hacker News Reader

After trying all these WebRTC options and the NAT traversal service (STUN, iirc) always being down, I ended up using IPFS instead. With public gateways from CloudFlare it is very easy to effectively drag and drop files and have them accessible via the IPFS-to-HTTPs gateway.

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For the rare times I have to do this I run a local server and the free version of CloudFlare argo tunnel. It provides an https url so the upload/download is safe from ISP snooping, there are also no size limits, you can send a 30GB file if you need to do that.

https://blog.cloudflare.com/a-free-argo-tunnel-for-your-next...

https://share.ipfs.io/#/ is also very convenient for simple p2p file transfers.

How does this work. Does the file need to pass through a server before reaching the other end? or is it streaming directly between sender and receiver?

Also, does it need to put the whole file in RAM first?

There is a server involved for mediating peer discovery but the file transfer itself is p2p.

Regarding your second point: I’m actually not sure if the file is copied into memory or if the browser just keeps a reference. I haven’t tried it with large files yet.

Doesn’t IPFS have problems with persistence? IOW you can’t guarantee a file will be available?

As long as you keep your node up and running your content will never disappear. So if you just want to share files with friends I can see this working well - just keep your node available.

There's two persistence types: pinned and unpinned files. Pinned files persist, but someone needs to seed them at least occasionally. Unpinned files get eventually garbage collected. If you want to share a file, you don't need to pin it if the recipient for example tells you when the download is complete. In this sense, all these WebRTC examples are more equivalent to unpinned files.

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