Comment by geoah
4 years ago
Really like the idea behind this. The basic premise is really interesting: Conversation between two people is direct p2p through tor, while groups require a server that people need to host. It's a really interesting middle ground between having to trust a single party with all your conversations and making everything truly p2p.
Easy to get around residential ISP NAT issues too. It's really easy for any software to start a local ephemeral onion service on Tor on their local machine and have it reachable worldwide in a couple seconds.
I'm a fan of this project and have been watching it for a while. It is my hope that more self-at-home-hosted options pop up in this space around Tor onion services.
> ...self-at-home-hosted options pop up in this space around Tor onion services.
See also: https://github.com/agl/pond
With Snowflake bridges, apps can now connect to the Tor network from within a browser.
Ref: https://snowflake.torproject.org/
Shameless plug, I also wrote a simple lib that makes onion services easy: https://github.com/cretz/bine (OP's project uses a fork of it and I plan on putting more time into it soon)
Tor isn't really P2P since messages need to go through Tor's network of routers.
The whole internet requires that any connection traverses numerous switches and routers. Unless you're pointing a microwave antenna at the destination to deliver your packets, the distinction here is pointless.
To be fair to the grandparent poster, who was downvoted, in the decentralized networking community there are protocols designed to be robust to different hardware setups, like over wifi or other ad hoc systems. Depending on tor from that perspective might be seen as restrictive.
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My first thought as well, since tor is built around the idea of bouncing connections around the network.
But "p2p" still makes sense, if we just consider tor a black box.
So nothing on the internet is peer to peer, since you have to go through ISP’s network of routers?
Your ISP sees everything. It might not be able to interpret and filter everything though.
Try traceroute google.com for example to see (some) of the hops your data packets are going through.