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Comment by porridgeraisin | Hacker News Reader

Useful, correct-enough information > objectively pedantically correct information. When people say lack of server infra in the context of a screensharing app, it is plain and obvious they exclude STUN/TURN, especially on HN. Come on now.

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To me "P2P with no servers" implies something like Kademlia that truly require no central servers after bootstrapping, although it is immediately obvious that they don't mean this when there's no details about the protocol presented prominently.

Bootstrapping in Kademlia also requires either a server or a Kademlia Node that previously has run the bootstrapping process, so I can't really see the benefit except of having more resilience against DDoS attacks.

I don't think there's any real benefit to be clear, I just thought that saying P2P and then saying "no servers" implied some fancy new distributed protocol.

Oh, thanks for the clarification! And to be frank, you're right on that it was somehow misleading. I hope the current state of the website is more clear on this topic.

WebRTC doesn't need it either in principle. The stun server is only to exchange IP addresses for the purpose of hole punching through NATs.

Even in p2p implementations that use kademlia, you need a way to figure out hole punching. In IPFS, while there is a decentralised hole punching method as an alternative to a centralised STUN server, it requires atleast one participant to not be behind a NAT, so for this purpose it's besides the point.

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