Saturday, December 2, 2017

When will it become accessible for everyday users to host their own content?

A huge impediment to P2P protocols really taking off and working properly has been IPv4 and NAT in particular. Port forwarding just isn't a satisfactory or adequate solution, it leaves many holes.

UPnP improves the situation somewhat, but it still often fails to work for users, and at least for me fails behind multiple routers. Sometimes routers just don't support it adequately, or users don't know or can't be bothered to activate it in router settings.

Torrents get around this by just assuming some peers won't be able to see other peers (i.e. pairs of users without port forwarding can't see eachother), a messy set of techniques know as NAT traversal that don't really work reliably notwithstanding, as far as I can tell.

So... when will we see some kind of protocol that restores the Internet's principle of end-to-end connectivity as originally envisioned?



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