I built an ephemeral P2P chat with WebRTC, without servers

(ephemchat.vercel.app)

14 points | by zRinexD 3 hours ago ago

12 comments

  • nikisweeting an hour ago

    THis is not without servers, you still use a signaling server for TURN.

    If you want true serverless you need a side channel to copy the offer/response, e.g. tell the user's to copy paste them as base64 thorugh whatsapp manually or something (https://github.com/pirate/webrtcchat).

  • elwebmaster 2 hours ago

    You should mention that it uses PeerJS. That's not without servers. PeerJS runs their own signaling server which you are relying on to connect your peers.

  • iamnothere an hour ago

    Matrix was once working on something similar, I wonder what the latest status is.

    In general, things like this are a great way around current pushes for age verification and mandatory surveillance. Give your friends a link to this, or even a web archive via USB stick, and chat directly without intermediaries. No need to run a server.

    (Others pointed out you still need a TURN server. True but hopefully there’s a P2P solution for this.)

  • zRinexD 3 hours ago

    I wanted to be able to talk to anyone in the world without relying on any company's servers. No censorship, no rules, no limits except the ones I set in my own room. So I built this.

    No signup, no registration. Just create a room with a password, share the code, and anyone can join directly. Everything is peer-to-peer, ephemeral, and disappears when you close the tab.

    Would love to hear what you think. Code is open source. Link: https://ephemchat.vercel.app/ Source code: https://github.com/zzrinexd/EphemChat

    • ranger_danger 2 hours ago

      Many users in the world are behind CGNAT or symmetrical NAT, and if both sides are, they will not be able to use WebRTC unless there is a TURN relay server involved. Does your software have a way to account for this?

      • zRinexD 2 hours ago

        Great question! Currently it uses Google's public STUN servers, which works for ~85% of connections. For the remaining cases, I'm planning to add a community-maintained list of TURN servers or a P2P fallback mechanism.

        • iamnothere an hour ago

          You could look into DHT as a way to distribute info about connected nodes, and maybe nodes with the right firewall setup could opt in to being TURN servers.

  • atmanactive 2 hours ago

    This is great, thanks! Would you accept a Github pull request to translate it to English and several other languages?

    • zRinexD 2 hours ago

      Absolutely! I'd love to make this accessible to everyone. English translation would be a great start. Let's coordinate on GitHub issues.

  • indigodaddy 2 hours ago

    - does the room vanish after the last user exits? Seems like it?

    - can the room code be tacked on to the url/slug?

  • michaelsbradley 2 hours ago

    What about use of TURN, entirely avoided?

  • villgax an hour ago

    Lol do your DD properly before posting