I built an ephemeral P2P chat with WebRTC, without servers(ephemchat.vercel.app)
16 pointsby zRinexD10 hours ago9 comments
  • nikisweeting8 hours 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).

    • ssss11an hour ago
      I wrote a webrtc chat prototype once that used a blockchain contract for the offer/response.

      It was cool but a little slow and I moved onto other side projects.

  • elwebmaster8 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.
  • zRinexD10 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

    • ramon1563 hours ago
      "No X, No Y"

      Thanks for admitting you made heavy use of LLMs and did not read the code. Why should I care?

    • ranger_danger8 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?
      • zRinexD8 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.
        • iamnothere7 hours 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.
  • atmanactive8 hours ago
    This is great, thanks! Would you accept a Github pull request to translate it to English and several other languages?
    • zRinexD8 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.
  • iamnothere7 hours 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.)

  • indigodaddy8 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?

  • michaelsbradley8 hours ago
    What about use of TURN, entirely avoided?
  • villgax7 hours ago
    Lol do your DD properly before posting
  • stainlu7 hours ago
    [flagged]