dimfisch

"Because Microsoft hates the world, they will show a "Windows protected your PC" warning when you try.

Because Apple hates the world even more, I can't publish it for iOS."

Gold

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synctext

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] :-)

[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

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layerv-ai

Super cool!! and similar in spirit to our open source project `qURL` [0] where you temporarily share access to private files or localhost apps. Less focused on general Google drive-style file sharing and more focused on the privacy of sharing; like single-use links and login-gates.

Great to see people building open source in this space since p2p sharing gets a lot more expansive and harder to get right with AI agents.

Have you been using this with personal agents like instinct or grok bot? Would be a great way to share files without allowing full computer use/exposing more access than you have to!

[0] https://github.com/layervai/qurl-go

YCombinedBob

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.

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cold_boot

Keeping the tunnel available between sends is the nice part. Once it's set up with someone, you can just use it.

smusamashah

Loosely related list of browser based and CLI tools to send files p2p https://gist.github.com/SMUsamaShah/fd6e275e44009b72f64d0570...

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rickcarlino

I wish someone would revisit the idea of a single, global, P2P file search mesh like Gnutella/Gnutella2 but using a modern P2P stack (or WebRTC) instead of raw TCP/UDP like the old days.

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akavel

Cool! I'll have to look deeper to see if I could use it as a base for porting https://github.com/akavel/catation to Rust+Iroh! (EDIT: related, do you maybe have plans to merge flipflop with https://github.com/andunieee/my-beloved-rubble ?)

May I ask, was it vibed/LLM-assisted to some extent, or is it purely human-made?

combyn8tor

How do you get 50 contributors on a project with 116 stars that's 3 months old? There are no PR's? Only one issue?

ramoz

Iroh released something similar awhile back

https://www.iroh.computer/sendme

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mcoliver

Can you talk a bit about the performance characteristics? What's the max throughput? How does that change with latency and jitter?

davidcollantes

Doesn’t Iroh rely on relays? If so, is it possible to run my own?

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kkapelon

Is it better/different than https://tailscale.com/docs/features/taildrop ?

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exe34

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.

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rgbrgb

cool project. slint looks nice

> filesharing for the meatspace era

serious question: what does this mean lol

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fartfeatures

I'm working on something similar, could you please turn on discussions so we can chat directly?

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StartingAbusine

Why native code?

I would think this could be done completely in the browser using WebRTC?

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tamimio

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.

A list of iroh based tools are also found here https://github.com/n0-computer/awesome-iroh

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