Interesting project, towards a decentralized Internet!
The heavy lifting is done in this function, pairing. You link your personal devices together, solid idea [0].
This Flipflop project relies on the Iroh library for NAT/Firewall puncturing, external address discovery and overlay networking. Connecting two 5G devices, without a coordinating central server is possible, but very hard. Iroh simply relies on a server which you could self-host. Cool stuff, we stress tested it a while ago and it somewhat worked.
NAT connectivity is unsolved. My university lab conducted one of the bigger puncturing studies a decade ago [1]. Recently, we also bought 40+ or something 4G and 5G SIM cards in Europe for puncturing [2]. My master student traveled Europe by bus to get these local SIM cards. He worked day-and-night to connect these weird symmetric 5G NAT filter boxes and got it working. Simple sync collision and birthday paradox brute force... It all works sometimes, but insufficiently reliable for mass-adoption. You can't build a decentralized social media ecosystem on top. Like Iroh, best to use a central server. So then you have legal liability for your users. Unless an AI agent buys the server fully autonomously using Bitcoin, next years students got that working[3] :-)
The self-replicating seedbox is a cool idea. Some places offer interest on stable coin deposits. I wonder if there could be a way to set up an account for AI use that would be self-replenishing so long as a budget is maintained.
rklaehn 8 hours ago [-]
We (iroh) don't do birthday paradox hole punching yet. There is some internal debate whether it is worth it.
So if you are in an extremely weird NAT you will fall back to a relay, either our public relays, your own relays rented from us via iroh services, or a self-hosted relay.
But I would argue that a p2p social application that occasionally uses a relay is very much preferable to a centralised app.
The relay is generic internet infrastructure. It just forwards end to end encrypted connections. It can not learn anything about the content.
A relay that is hosted on a non KYC server rented via ZCash would be interesting though if you are super paranoid.
synctext 6 hours ago [-]
Yeah, we need "generic Internet infrastructure" for linking devices.
By 2030 we hopefully understand the mathematics-of-trust and can link all the billions of citizens together in a single overlay.
> non KYC server rented via ZCash would be interesting though if you are super paranoid.
What will happen if a decentralized Internet emerged and presented an existential threat to existing profit margins? Company lawyer would start to attack you, correct?
broken-kebab 4 hours ago [-]
>What will happen if a decentralized Internet emerged and presented an existential threat to existing profit margins? Company lawyer would start to attack you, correct?
I think it's very misplaced concern. Commercially-viable internet will not be decentralized because of legal restrictions. If whatever engineering solution will be found to weaken them, governments will step in to curtail it. FWIW any moderately successful decentralization effort is more likely to be attacked from exactly this side: some countries will hate it for uncontrolled information dissemination, others for fiscal reasons.
embedding-shape 6 hours ago [-]
> You can't build a decentralized social media ecosystem on top. Like Iroh, best to use a central server. So then you have legal liability for your users.
You can, ATProto has the example schematics for how, but it's has a federated rather than distributed architecture, but I don't think "federation" is a hard constraint of the design, more like an implementation detail, and as long as you can do the signalling centrally, to connect the peers, you can do the rest P2P. So sure, legal liability for the connection of peers, but all data transfers would still be directly P2P. AFAIK, Iroh also does "Centralized signaling > P2P data transfers", even when NAT is in the way.
But it's more for when you already use Tailscale, which relies on a central server and someone who "owns" that network.
In Flipflop you don't need anything besides the app, and each two peers form a "network" of their own, with no owner and no management.
1 hours ago [-]
kkapelon 1 hours ago [-]
> which relies on a central server and someone who "owns" that network
Tailscale connections are peer-to-peer. They only own the coordination server, which you can ignore and host your own.
andunie 1 hours ago [-]
Yes, but someone, a user with an account on Tailscale, is the manager of that network and can decide what devices can get in, etc.
For some cases that is good, but Flipflop is addressing a slightly different use case.
kkapelon 5 minutes ago [-]
The Readme literally says "Use it to share stuff between all your devices".
I would argue that Tailnet is a good match for this.
Maybe expand the readme to cover other use cases interesting to existing Tailscale users?
janandonly 7 hours ago [-]
It is better in one way: Taildrop supports iOS.
andunie 4 hours ago [-]
I agree with this
tamimio 2 hours ago [-]
iroh is different and more than just a vpn, where you use a bunch of tools together, you can do it all in iroh with one identity, the tunnel, the file transfer, the ssh access, and others. Look at tunnet for example https://github.com/tunnetio/Tunnet to get a better idea.
embedding-shape 6 hours ago [-]
Better, who knows. Seems different in that Flipflop uses P2P connections directly to the peer, alternatively via other available peers (and initial connection might use central signaling server), while taildrop seems to depend on a tailnet, which is typically hosted by Tailscale (unless you run that yourself).
I guess it's a bit like comparing WeTransfer with Airdrop, one tries to use the network they're on already (internet) where the other favors local-local connections.
kkapelon 1 hours ago [-]
> which is typically hosted by Tailscale
Tailscale hosts relay servers as a fallback. Connections are peer-to-peer between devices.
embedding-shape 32 minutes ago [-]
I think it always does the initial connection via the DERP relays, doesn't it? Even if a direct initial connection in theory is possible (no NATs or anything else in the way), the connection itself is always established via the relays, then "upgraded" to a local connection. But maybe they've changed this since I looked at it?
Beyond that, even with a local connection established, all the coordination traffic will still go via the tailnet, those don't suddenly become local-first. But this might also have changed.
What I'm sure is still there today, is that all Tailscale clients automatically upload their logs to Tailscale's servers unless you opt out:
> Each Tailscale agent in your distributed network streams its logs to a central log server (at log.tailscale.com). This includes real-time events for open and close events for every inter-machine connection (TCP or UDP) on your network. - https://tailscale.com/docs/features/logging
Of course, doesn't stop a local connection from working so is only tangentially related, but worth keeping in mind that a "local tailscale connection" still has a lot of external traffic related to it, even though the data you transfer, when possible, uses more local connections.
kkapelon 9 minutes ago [-]
It is two completely different things
1. The co-ordination server for the initial handoff. You can self-host if you want
2. Derp relays (for actual traffic). you can also self-host (peer relays)
Actually if self-hosting is that important to you, there are also newer solutions like netbird and netmaker that might worth a look.
miyuru 5 hours ago [-]
tailscale does P2P too, it only fails back relays to when it cannot do P2P.
YCombinedBob 9 hours ago [-]
This actually looks good and uses the established Iroh.
Nice idea with the browser link to share with devices that dont have flipflop on the same LAN. This would be a killer if this would also work via internet!
Not sure if Iroh can run in the browser though.
andunie 4 hours ago [-]
This is a pretty good idea, it didn't occur to me, I'll try to implement it.
I never tried Iroh in the browser, but supposedly it works (by always using a relay).
Keeping the tunnel available between sends is the nice part. Once it's set up with someone, you can just use it.
mcoliver 10 hours ago [-]
Can you talk a bit about the performance characteristics? What's the max throughput? How does that change with latency and jitter?
fartfeatures 4 hours ago [-]
I'm working on something similar, could you please turn on discussions so we can chat directly?
andunie 3 hours ago [-]
I've turned discussions on, although we could chat here too
ramoz 2 hours ago [-]
What are discussions?
exe34 8 hours ago [-]
Nice idea, but for personal sharing between my devices, I have a syncthing folder that's synced between my laptop, phone and media center/NAS, and I've been finding that most of my day to day files have been migrating into it, and I hardly ever use things outside of it.
jboss10 4 hours ago [-]
I have a similar setup. I have my git repos as headless repos in my syncthing folder and use it instead of github.
andunie 3 hours ago [-]
I also use Syncthing, been using it for many years, it is great
iFrees 3 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
tamimio 2 hours ago [-]
Looks very interesting, I have been building few things on top of iroh past few weeks and I love it, from the ability to run it on some iot all the way to be rf agnostic (almost, can’t use LoRa with iroh due to its datagram limit), and best part, MoQ runs natively on iroh where on wireguard you will need to encrypt twice so more cpu, but i found kernel wireguard performs better at bulk throughput, and layer 3 isn’t by default unless you have TUN like added.
I would think this could be done completely in the browser using WebRTC?
kennywinker 10 hours ago [-]
Iroh networking isn’t available in browser, and presents some cool ways to link things together - i suspect the connection by using iroh is more robust and solid than webrtc, but i’m just guessing.
But iroh is designed bare metal first, we currently support the browser via WASM, but only with relay mode.
We will solve browser eventually, but I think it is a mistake to build peer to peer tech browser first. We think it is better to make it extremely efficient on bare metal first, and then grow into the restricted browser ecosystem where possible.
Browsers are very restricted environments.
andunie 3 hours ago [-]
WebRTC only works in very specific conditions, most of the time you'll need a TURN server anyway, so it's probably better to just use an Iroh relay (you can run your own)
P2P is better then TURN/Iroh Relay. Even if traffic is encrypted the size of what you are passing through is valuable metadata. Or the time at what you send things. P2P is always better for users.
andunie 1 hours ago [-]
Of course P2P is better, my point was that it doesn't work in the browser most of the times, and your link seems to corroborate it.
fartfeatures 4 hours ago [-]
That is strictly true but there are work arounds. For example you can talk to an Iroh relay server from inside of a browser. You can also get round this with extensions. Unfortunately Google whitelist who can do this but it can be done on Safari.
hizlikovboy27 9 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
km_DEV7 9 hours ago [-]
[dead]
DylanMerigaud 10 hours ago [-]
[dead]
Rendered at 16:16:56 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
The heavy lifting is done in this function, pairing. You link your personal devices together, solid idea [0].
This Flipflop project relies on the Iroh library for NAT/Firewall puncturing, external address discovery and overlay networking. Connecting two 5G devices, without a coordinating central server is possible, but very hard. Iroh simply relies on a server which you could self-host. Cool stuff, we stress tested it a while ago and it somewhat worked.
NAT connectivity is unsolved. My university lab conducted one of the bigger puncturing studies a decade ago [1]. Recently, we also bought 40+ or something 4G and 5G SIM cards in Europe for puncturing [2]. My master student traveled Europe by bus to get these local SIM cards. He worked day-and-night to connect these weird symmetric 5G NAT filter boxes and got it working. Simple sync collision and birthday paradox brute force... It all works sometimes, but insufficiently reliable for mass-adoption. You can't build a decentralized social media ecosystem on top. Like Iroh, best to use a central server. So then you have legal liability for your users. Unless an AI agent buys the server fully autonomously using Bitcoin, next years students got that working[3] :-)
[0] https://github.com/andunieee/flipflop/blob/62bb498520aacb60e...
[1] UDP NAT and Firewall Puncturing in the Wild, https://inria.hal.science/hal-01597969v1/document
[2] Mass Adoption of NATs: Survey and experiments on carrier-grade NATs, https://arxiv.org/html/2311.04658v2
[3] Self-replicating seedbox servers using programmable money, https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.05431
So if you are in an extremely weird NAT you will fall back to a relay, either our public relays, your own relays rented from us via iroh services, or a self-hosted relay.
But I would argue that a p2p social application that occasionally uses a relay is very much preferable to a centralised app.
The relay is generic internet infrastructure. It just forwards end to end encrypted connections. It can not learn anything about the content.
A relay that is hosted on a non KYC server rented via ZCash would be interesting though if you are super paranoid.
By 2030 we hopefully understand the mathematics-of-trust and can link all the billions of citizens together in a single overlay.
> non KYC server rented via ZCash would be interesting though if you are super paranoid.
What will happen if a decentralized Internet emerged and presented an existential threat to existing profit margins? Company lawyer would start to attack you, correct?
I think it's very misplaced concern. Commercially-viable internet will not be decentralized because of legal restrictions. If whatever engineering solution will be found to weaken them, governments will step in to curtail it. FWIW any moderately successful decentralization effort is more likely to be attacked from exactly this side: some countries will hate it for uncontrolled information dissemination, others for fiscal reasons.
You can, ATProto has the example schematics for how, but it's has a federated rather than distributed architecture, but I don't think "federation" is a hard constraint of the design, more like an implementation detail, and as long as you can do the signalling centrally, to connect the peers, you can do the rest P2P. So sure, legal liability for the connection of peers, but all data transfers would still be directly P2P. AFAIK, Iroh also does "Centralized signaling > P2P data transfers", even when NAT is in the way.
May I ask, was it vibed/LLM-assisted to some extent, or is it purely human-made?
But it's more for when you already use Tailscale, which relies on a central server and someone who "owns" that network.
In Flipflop you don't need anything besides the app, and each two peers form a "network" of their own, with no owner and no management.
Tailscale connections are peer-to-peer. They only own the coordination server, which you can ignore and host your own.
For some cases that is good, but Flipflop is addressing a slightly different use case.
I would argue that Tailnet is a good match for this.
Maybe expand the readme to cover other use cases interesting to existing Tailscale users?
I guess it's a bit like comparing WeTransfer with Airdrop, one tries to use the network they're on already (internet) where the other favors local-local connections.
Tailscale hosts relay servers as a fallback. Connections are peer-to-peer between devices.
Beyond that, even with a local connection established, all the coordination traffic will still go via the tailnet, those don't suddenly become local-first. But this might also have changed.
What I'm sure is still there today, is that all Tailscale clients automatically upload their logs to Tailscale's servers unless you opt out:
> Each Tailscale agent in your distributed network streams its logs to a central log server (at log.tailscale.com). This includes real-time events for open and close events for every inter-machine connection (TCP or UDP) on your network. - https://tailscale.com/docs/features/logging
Of course, doesn't stop a local connection from working so is only tangentially related, but worth keeping in mind that a "local tailscale connection" still has a lot of external traffic related to it, even though the data you transfer, when possible, uses more local connections.
1. The co-ordination server for the initial handoff. You can self-host if you want
2. Derp relays (for actual traffic). you can also self-host (peer relays)
Actually if self-hosting is that important to you, there are also newer solutions like netbird and netmaker that might worth a look.
Nice idea with the browser link to share with devices that dont have flipflop on the same LAN. This would be a killer if this would also work via internet! Not sure if Iroh can run in the browser though.
I never tried Iroh in the browser, but supposedly it works (by always using a relay).
https://www.iroh.computer/sendme
A list of iroh based tools are also found here https://github.com/n0-computer/awesome-iroh
I would think this could be done completely in the browser using WebRTC?
But iroh is designed bare metal first, we currently support the browser via WASM, but only with relay mode.
We will solve browser eventually, but I think it is a mistake to build peer to peer tech browser first. We think it is better to make it extremely efficient on bare metal first, and then grow into the restricted browser ecosystem where possible.
Browsers are very restricted environments.
P2P is better then TURN/Iroh Relay. Even if traffic is encrypted the size of what you are passing through is valuable metadata. Or the time at what you send things. P2P is always better for users.