Show HN: Flipflop – Iroh-powered persistent tunnels for filesharing
4 days ago (github.com)
This is a project that spun from my frustrations of using LocalSend and DashBeam to transfer stuff between devices, and with the extra goal of being fast, trying out the Slint framework and, most importantly, establishing a communication channel with trusted external people that can be left always on.
"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
> "Because Microsoft hates the world, they will show a "Windows protected your PC" warning when you try.
Yet at the end of the day, Microsoft is a Rust Foundation platinum member.
There are many, many ways for a corporation to express its hatred of the world. There's only one way to become a platinum member of the Rust Foundation, and Microsoft finds that in its couch cushions.
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
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.
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?
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> 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.
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.
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.
I have a similar setup. I have my git repos as headless repos in my syncthing folder and use it instead of github.
I also use Syncthing, been using it for many years, it is great
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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.
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.
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
I've also been using Iroh lately, it's pretty neat. I use it to create a connection between my Mac and a pi that I shoved in a closet on an isolated network. The pi reads my house's electric and water meters with an rtl sdr device, and the Mac connects to it every 30 minutes or so to grab and record the latest readings. The pi doesn't have a stable ip (or, I didn't set it up with one), so the Mac uses an Iroh ticket to connect to the pi.
It's much overengineered for what it's doing, and there are definitely less complicated ways to just connect to the pi, but half the fun is playing with new tech.
Mind sharing the bit about IOT? I'm also looking for a way to get iroh working on something like esp32 for audio streaming. Was wondering if moq can be used here
Iroh works on most esp32. Here is a mixed bag of examples for various esp32 variants.
https://github.com/n0-computer/iroh-esp32-examples
Most examples that I did so far were about simple sensors, but audio streaming should work as well. If you need high bandwidth you might want to look into using the esp32 built in crypto hardware acceleration though.
Although audio is probably fine, but if you want to do video via an esp32 you will need the hardware crypto.
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?
Iroh released something similar awhile back
https://www.iroh.computer/sendme
Sendme and iroh-blobs author here.
Sendme is a demo for iroh and a very useful standalone tool, but it is more about quick ad-hoc transfers.
I think flipflop is using iroh-blobs for data transfer, so you can think about it as like sendme but with permanent connections.
Ok nice find! Did you try it?
Can you talk a bit about the performance characteristics? What's the max throughput? How does that change with latency and jitter?
Loosely related list of browser based and CLI tools to send files p2p https://gist.github.com/SMUsamaShah/fd6e275e44009b72f64d0570...
Big list, without much description. Does anyone have any suggestion for something like a private Napster for a friend group?
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.
It’s something I’ve thought about a lot recently.
I decided not to build it because I think open, decentralized, and encrypted file sharing with good search is something of a Pandora’s box.
IPFS?
I don’t think IPFS was built for search. I see some unmaintained projects that sniff DHT traffic for hints, but (correct me if I am wrong here) the protocol maintainers never added a search layer. Eg I can’t search for “violin” and find the hash for “learn violin.pdf”.
Is it better/different than https://tailscale.com/docs/features/taildrop ?
Taildrop looks good, I didn't know about it.
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.
> 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.
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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.
> which is typically hosted by Tailscale
Tailscale hosts relay servers as a fallback. Connections are peer-to-peer between devices.
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tailscale does P2P too, it only fails back relays to when it cannot do P2P.
It is better in one way: Taildrop supports iOS.
I agree with this
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.
Why native code?
I would think this could be done completely in the browser using WebRTC?
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.
There are some projects that implement an iroh webrtc custom transport that works in the browser. E.g. https://iroh-webrtc-demo.datei.jetzt/#?addpeer=fd4341f14b4eb...
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.
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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.
the tl;dr seems to be simply that it wasn't implemented yet
i've been pretty interested in this as well and got this snippet from chatgpt: `So could Iroh add direct browser-to-native connections without a proxy? Yes, by adding WebRTC support to the native side as well. Iroh’s own browser roadmap describes that approach and identifies the additional native WebRTC stack as a significant dependency cost. It does not describe a fundamental impossibility.`
i may take a stab at adding this functionality soon
There are several pure browser iroh custom transport implementations that use webrtc. The challenge would be to have this also work with native clients, preferably without blowing up the binary so much that we can no longer ship it to resource constrained devices.
I won't like - webrtc will probably never graduate to a built-in transport. But we would be very happy about a bare metal webrtc transport and link it from our official docs for people that need it.
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?
I'm working on something similar, could you please turn on discussions so we can chat directly?
I've turned discussions on, although we could chat here too
What are discussions?
Apologies, discussions on Github
Doesn’t Iroh rely on relays? If so, is it possible to run my own?
Yes, it's even encouraged. You can either pay for the company behind iroh to host one for you or host your own one.
Yes, we are happy to take over the burden to provide relays and handle the 3am phone call. See https://www.iroh.computer/pricing
But if you are technically proficient enough to run your own infra we are happy too. Our relay is open source just like the rest of iroh, and we even try to make it very easy to run them, no weird hoops to jump through.
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
cool project. slint looks nice
> filesharing for the meatspace era
serious question: what does this mean lol
I assume individuals have to meet in order to become peers.
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