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Comment by vs4vijay | Hacker News Reader

Have you explored Magic Wormhole - https://github.com/magic-wormhole/magic-wormhole

"LocalSend is a free, open-source app that allows you to securely share files and messages with nearby devices over your local network, without needing an internet connection."

Pardon the ignorance but why would someone use Magic Wormhole to transfer files/messages between computers on the same LAN. Would there be a rendezvous server listening on a local address. What if the two devices are owned by the same person.

If they use the Magic Wormhole default settings the files/messages will travel over the internet, using a third party rendezvous server.

Messages – yes. Files – no, unless the devices can't connect to each other directly. The only problem I see with this setup is that you can't use it without Internet connection. Perhaps sending side could advertise via mDNS in this case?

> If they use the Magic Wormhole default settings the files/messages will travel over the internet, using a third party rendezvous server.

I am very, very sure this is incorrect. The rendezvous indeed happens over the internet with their default handshake server, but the transfer itself should run in LAN.

Yes, thank you for the correction. Sloppy wording on my part. What I meant was the rendezvous happens over the internet.

Perhaps Magic Wormhole has an option to forward traffic (if so, IMHO that's not peer-to-peer) but I only meant the process of setting peer-to-peer connections requires packets to travel over the internet and, by default, to a third party server.

Yes, the "setup" messages via the Mailbox Server will be over the internet to a third-party server.

All the contents of these messages are end-to-end encrypted so you reveal which two IP addresses are communicating, but not the contents of those communications. (If you don't want to reveal that, use the Tor options).

The "bulk transfer" connection should be over the LAN only if both devices are on the same network. In any case, all of these messages are also end-to-end encrypted as well.

This doesn’t run on iOS.

I use Destiny, which is magic-wormhole for iOS:

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/destiny-secure-file-transfer/i...

https://github.com/LeastAuthority/destiny

Unfortunately it uses different mailbox URLs from magic wormhole, so it isn’t compatible with those clients.

Has anyone attempted to combine all of these desperate open source p2p file sharing solutions into a single app?

Like, if any time someone mained one of these systems, you could assume you had it. Even do discovery for everything at once on the receive side, and if both of you have the omni-sender thing just pick what protocol to send it over.

It is compatible, you just have to configure the other client to use the same servers.

For example, to use the "wormhole" Python CLI with Destiny, you can do this:

wormhole --relay-url wss://mailbox.mw.leastauthority.com/v1 --transit-helper tcp:relay.mw.leastauthority.com:4001 send README.rst

Then, the code it prints out can be consumed by a Destiny (or https://winden.app ) client.

That does not look user-friendly at all, and I cannot give that to a non tech person to use this.

It’s great, but no phone apps.

https://winden.app is a Web client

"Destiny" is an Android and iOS client https://github.com/LeastAuthority/destiny/

(These two use servers run by Least Authority by default so to talk to other clients you have to configure Destiny to use the defaults, or the other side to use the non-default servers).

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