alt Hacker NewsShow HN: Flipflop, Iroh-powered persistent tunnels for filesharing
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.
Comments
Is it better/different than https://tailscale.com/docs/features/taildrop ?
I'm working on something similar, could you please turn on discussions so we can chat directly?
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.
Keeping the tunnel available between sends is the nice part. Once it's set up with someone, you can just use it.
Can you talk a bit about the performance characteristics? What's the max throughput? How does that change with latency and jitter?
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.
Why native code?
I would think this could be done completely in the browser using WebRTC?
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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