Hacker News Reader

>Sadly both WebRTC and WebSockets seem to have been designed in such a way that excludes pure peer-to-peer operation.

What do you mean by pure peer-to-peer operation?

When there's no need for a central server(s) to establish connection.

Is there any P2P network that fits that criteria? The first time you connect, you need to know at least one publicly reachable node but I fail to see how that relates to WebSocket/WebRTC. I think central server is somewhat ambiguous because the bootnode could be any node on the network you have prior knowledge of.

As I mentioned in the sibling, there's multicast/broadcast (classic multiplayer games used it) and you could do IP scanning.

I still don't understand what this has to do with WebRTC/WebSocket. You can combine, e.g., mDNS with WebRTC and build a pure peer-to-peer network.

You can't use mDNS in the browser.

The standards are carefully defined in a way that creates server dependency. WebSocket outright does not allow connections to other browsers directly. WebRTC does, but you are extremely limited in how you could do discovery. I think both are intentional.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com