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?
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
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
It'd be nice if the Getting Started link on the n0des page went here instead of immediately asking me to sign up before I know what the hell I'm signing up for
Dumbpipe is using our set of relays. It is meant as a standalone tool as well as a showcase for what you can do with iroh.
If you use iroh as a library, you can specify your own relays.
It is important to mention that relays are interoperable, so you don't have isolated bubbles of nodes using certain relay networks. I can have the n0 relays specified and still talk to another node that is using a different set of relays.
