Like DDNS, but decentralized. Live demo.

Say I want to open an encrypted socket into a LAN server from a static site to power a self-hosted app. I could use a DDNS service, but what's the point of P2P networking if it's facilitated by a centralized service? I could hard-code the IP, but that changes too easily. What I want is Decentralized DDNS.

So I used IPFS to store my IP candidates allowing me to read them back from a web gateway, of which several exist. You could imagine observing your IP and publishing a new JSON object under an IPNS key, but you don't have to. IPFS propagates this information automatically through its WAN peer DHT. Bonus points because IPFS already implements STUN and UPnP.

Now the problem becomes how to get the values out of the DHT from a browser. As it would happen, the libp2p team is working on exactly this problem and provides some attractive gateways serving as routing delegates. Their sole job is tracking the peer DHT. Instantiate a libp2p node served by those delegates and you can (finally) open a socket.

This site serves as a light frontend to the routing delegates providing network address lookups for peer IDs. You could use the same principles to power a fully P2P application.

This approach still relies on federated servers. If they go down or change the protocol, the approach falls apart. On the flipside, you can easily host your own and run it alongside. You should do that for any critical application anyway.

• Start a local IPFS node using ipfs-core:

  // Use the JavaScript implementation.
  // The Golang version doesn't advertise in the same way.
  require('ipfs-core').create()

• Copy and paste the peer ID into the DDDNS search form.