Post

Iroh
@iroh.computer

@pvh.ca speaks truth, but there's one more corner in the design space: you can federate the infrastructure instead of centralizing it. That's the choice we made for iroh relays: you can run your own (it's OSS!), and endpoints connected to your relay can talk to endpoints connected to other relays.

pvh@pvh.ca

All peer-to-peer systems have to compromise one way or another on this: they can decide that direct P2P is essential and simply fail, they can provide centralized fallback alternatives, or they can try to find/convince/incentivize another peer to route traffic on your behalf.

4 reposts26 likes

pvh
@pvh.ca

Yeah, this is a good distinction. The peer-to-peer vs federated vs centralized debate is as old as time. I *do* believe there are pretty strong economic scaling effects that encourage centralization as the long-run effect of commoditzation but other effects (data sovereignty?) may counteract that.