Flipflop - Persistent Iroh-powered file tunnels for any device
Show HN: Flipflop, iroh-powered persistent tunnels for filesharing
Flipflop is a cross-platform file-sharing tool that creates a trusted, persistent tunnel between your devices. Built on Iroh, it works over Bluetooth, LAN, or the open internet, letting you send files, links, and plain text anytime without reconnecting. Ideal for sharing across your own devices or with family members, near or far. Available for Linux, macOS, Windows, and Android via F-Droid, Flatpak, and direct releases. It solves the friction of ad-hoc transfers by keeping a secure channel always ready.
Establish a trusted tunnel between two or more devices: from that point on one can send files to the other anytime.
- ramoz
Iroh released something similar awhile back
- synctext
Interesting project, towards a decentralized Internet!
The heavy lifting is done in this function, pairing. You link your personal devices together, solid idea [0].
This Flipflop project relies on the Iroh library for NAT/Firewall puncturing, external address discovery and overlay networking. Connecting two 5G devices, without a coordinating central server is possible, but very hard. Iroh simply relies on a server which you could self-host. Cool stuff, we stress tested it a while ago and it somewhat worked.
NAT connectivity is unsolved. My university lab conducted one of the bigger puncturing studies a decade ago [1]. Recently, we also bought 40+ or something 4G and 5G SIM cards in Europe for puncturing [2]. My master student traveled Europe by bus to get these local SIM cards. He worked day-and-night to connect these weird symmetric 5G NAT filter boxes and got it working. Simple sync collision and birthday paradox brute force... It all works sometimes, but insufficiently reliable for mass-adoption. You can't build a decentralized social media ecosystem on top. Like Iroh, best to use a central server. So then you have legal liability for your users. Unless an AI agent buys the server fully autonomously using Bitcoin, next years students got that working[3] :-)
[0] https://github.com/andunieee/flipflop/blob/62bb498520aacb60e...
[1] UDP NAT and Firewall Puncturing in the Wild, https://inria.hal.science/hal-01597969v1/document
[2] Mass Adoption of NATs: Survey and experiments on […]
- kkapelon
Is it better/different than https://tailscale.com/docs/features/taildrop ?
- YCombinedBob
This actually looks good and uses the established Iroh.
Nice idea with the browser link to share with devices that dont have flipflop on the same LAN. This would be a killer if this would also work via internet!
Not sure if Iroh can run in the browser though.
- cold_boot
Keeping the tunnel available between sends is the nice part. Once it's set up with someone, you can just use it.