Thanks for the feedback! Chitchatter uses https://www.metered.ca/tools/openrelay/ for relaying communication when P2P connections can't be established. So, chatting should "just work" for users right now. I don't know if the current connection type (P2P or relayed) can be determined by JavaScript. If not, it seems that allowing the user to disable relaying servers might be the safest option (at the expense of the app not actually working).

Just to follow up here, it turns out that there may be a way to detect if a peer connection is direct or relayed: https://stackoverflow.com/a/53138581

I'll try to surface this information to the user!

nice :)

I was curious about this too. In my experience the real obstacle behind true p2p is everyone is behind a router or firewall these days with shared ip. Most also prevent hole punching through port randomization.

Tailscale comes up here a lot recently, and their article on how they do p2p over routers and firewalls (NAT traversal) is superb: https://tailscale.com/blog/how-nat-traversal-works/

Unfortunately it doesn't include statistics on how successful the strategies are in practice.

Yes, not many people measured NAT boxes at scale. "UDP NAT and Firewall Puncturing in the Wild" [1] this scientific article from our lab might be helpful. We also have UDP puncturing also working in a 3G or wifi setting with Android-to-Android mode, see "Kotlin-IPv8" link in here: https://github.com/Tribler/trustchain-superapp

[1] https://hal.inria.fr/hal-01597969/document

Thanks for the link