Now, see. that's what I said as well. But the rest of the team was tired of me trying to name the hosted iroh "n0des", which I'm now ready to admit was a stretch. And so now here we are spelling n0q as noq. c'est la vie.

It's been a draft for a long while, and was only recently approved

disclosure: I work on the team behind noq. Can't emphasize enough that the quinn maintainers are really lovely people, and quinn is an excellent project.

Can confirm! We work closely with them at Datum

worm-blossom crew is just a delightful bunch of humans doing really great work

delighted to hear! iroh-blobs is Rüdiger's love letter to BLAKE3, and hot dang has he taken this piece of machinery quite far. Much of this is covered in the post, but some highlights:

* fetch any sub-sequence of bytes, verified on send & receive * fetch sub-sequences of bytes in collections (sets of blobs / directories) * store on disk, inlining small blobs into the database for faster lookups * fan in from disk & the network * "multi-provider" fan in that can re-plan a fetch on the fly * should land support for WASM compilation (browsers) soon! https://github.com/n0-computer/iroh-blobs/pull/187

We're hard at work on making the API more ergonomic, but as a foundational protocol it's truly impressive. Rudi has been working with the BLAKE3 authors on both perf testing & the hazmat API.

disclosure: I work on iroh

Yep! It's totally usable for games, and used in a few! One of my favs is the godot engine plugin: https://github.com/tipragot/godot-iroh

QUIC can do both reliable & unreliable streams, as can iroh

yes, to an extent. It will time out if the connection completely dies for more than the timeout interval, but all connections are designed to survive changes to network changes like IP address or network interface (eg: switching from WiFi to ethernet, or cellular)

same team behind dumbpipe makes sendme, which is much closer to this use case! https://github.com/n0-computer/sendme

it's p2p. dumbpipe is hardcoded to use a public set of relays that we run for free (we being number 0, the team that make iroh & dumbpipe).

we can definitely add a config argument to skip the hardcoded relays & provide custom ones!

Thanks for the response. This statement confuses me a bit. What is a relay? Does traffic go through it at all, or is it for connection negotiation, or some of both?

Your questions are answered in TFA, including multiple links to documentation about the process.

https://www.iroh.computer/docs/concepts/relay \

https://crates.io/crates/iroh

sibling comment with links to docs is the more accurate, but to summarize, it's some of both:

* all connections are always e2ee (even when traffic flows through a relay)

* relays are both for connection negotiation, and as a fallback when a direct connection isn't possible

* initial packet is always sent through the relay to keep a fast time-to-first-byte, while a direct connection is negotiated in parallel. typical connections send a few hundred bytes over the relay & the rest of the connection lifetime is direct

tl;dr: resolving ids to destinations requires a third party relay

relays _can_ be used to resolve IDs, but so can mDNS, an email or any other form of third party channel

the use case here is somebody opens a web browser and types/pastes an ID into the top bar -- and it needs to resolve, correctly, without prior knowledge, in roughly the same amount of time that DNS takes today

relays are the only thing among the things you listed that even have a chance of solving this problem

Thanks for the heads up! We've fixed: https://github.com/n0-computer/dumbpipe.dev/pull/11