fiatjaf on Nostr: WebRTC might be the biggest scam in all the "web" (aka Google Chrome) technologies. I ...
WebRTC might be the biggest scam in all the "web" (aka Google Chrome) technologies.
I don't know about the ideas behind creation of WebRTC, but the way it was sold, and has been consistently sold for the last 10 years, is that it is a thing that you can plug in your code and it will magically work.
Oh, right, it also requires a STUN server, but look, you don't have to host anything, there are dozens of free public STUN servers on the internet -- and after that the WebRTC connection is established and you can freely transfer data, voice, video, everything!
Turns out WebRTC is useless without TURN servers, which just relay the entire bulk of the data and, most importantly, are not hosted for free by anyone for anyone else.
To this day developers keep dreaming of a magic peer-to-peer web that can be powered by WebRTC and wasting their weekends writing super nice projects that rely on WebRTC -- without TURN servers -- and therefore do not work at all. The worst part is that they always work when tested locally, generally in the same computer, two different browser tabs or even two different browsers (although in the second case no always).
I'm writing this because I just saw an anonymous developer talking about doing WebRTC signaling over Nostr as if that was the hard part. There is also a WebRTC signaling over Nostr NIP proposal. These things are everywhere. I have myself written at least two projects that relied on WebRTC in the past hoping that time it would be different and p2p would work.
I don't know about the ideas behind creation of WebRTC, but the way it was sold, and has been consistently sold for the last 10 years, is that it is a thing that you can plug in your code and it will magically work.
Oh, right, it also requires a STUN server, but look, you don't have to host anything, there are dozens of free public STUN servers on the internet -- and after that the WebRTC connection is established and you can freely transfer data, voice, video, everything!
Turns out WebRTC is useless without TURN servers, which just relay the entire bulk of the data and, most importantly, are not hosted for free by anyone for anyone else.
To this day developers keep dreaming of a magic peer-to-peer web that can be powered by WebRTC and wasting their weekends writing super nice projects that rely on WebRTC -- without TURN servers -- and therefore do not work at all. The worst part is that they always work when tested locally, generally in the same computer, two different browser tabs or even two different browsers (although in the second case no always).
I'm writing this because I just saw an anonymous developer talking about doing WebRTC signaling over Nostr as if that was the hard part. There is also a WebRTC signaling over Nostr NIP proposal. These things are everywhere. I have myself written at least two projects that relied on WebRTC in the past hoping that time it would be different and p2p would work.