> alternatively, what's a quick way to share a file with a random person that I meet on the street without unnecessary friction or leaving unnecessary traces.
There’s a lot of things that cumulatively make this hard. Some of them are “social” more than technical, and some are technically hard because of society. But importantly, people have made webpages that just p2p link two devices (eg wormhole).
Generally, no one wants to be the third party to facilitate anonymous, easy content sharing. Because people do bad things with such power. Due to the way most people consume the internet, everything is behind NATs and we’ve exhausted the IP(4) space, so p2p is pretty hard, but doable especially with a signaling server. It’s really hard to leave no trace because again, no one wants to be anonymous really, and pseudonymous tools like BitTorrent still leave subtle traces in the DHT.
> What's the best solution for this?
First, define “unnecessary”. But then…
Probably to change your criteria. I’ve never been in or can imagine a (legal and good for society) situation where I needed truly anonymous file sharing, without any ability to install anything, at a moments notice.
If you’re eg sharing with a journalist, you can take time to install software, or host content for download, or upload content to them, even if you needed to be anonymous.
If you need to it be on the street in a moment, no time for an app, you can probably just share an email or Google drive link.
If you can’t install anything, and you can’t use a 3rd party server, you should just hand them an SD card with the content. You already need to be in person to exchange public keys and hashes and whatnot.
The only true use case I can imagine needing so many anonymous protections is to share… bad media files that shouldn’t be shared with people who want them.
> Share content between two random devices
Easy… Dropbox, SFTP, torrents, USB drive etc
> without having to install an app
You’re limited to built in tools only. So either trust SMS or email, or use a browser. Either way, you need a third party server to relay the content or the software (email server, or server to host a webpage et ).
You can use Dropbox etc, you can use web torrent. You can email. USB drive.
> without having to share the content with a third party
Ok… less tools already available, you can still use webtorrent but you’ll need to exchange the magnet link and the content hashed would be in a DHT. Sorta a 3rd party but you can minimize actual content leak.
Knowing I’d the server (or other party) is logging a lot of data is question you might not be able to know.
Also a usb drive.
> having to have a verified (by third party) identity
I wouldn’t host a service without identities but at this point you have options already in the p2p space. IPFS, web torrent, p2p chat services, DAT, a bunch of things exist.
I don’t think the use case of this project is to share clipboard data with a VM. Especially not if you’re hosting the VM yourself (“clipboard access” implies you’re using the host). That’s an option in the readme BUT… why do all that? You don’t really need encrypted traffic, or identities, etc.
This project is probably for learning purposes of the developer, which is great, but I don’t know what actually use case I’d find for it is.