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Why's there still no open-source peer-to-peer standards-based encrypted chat and video meeting software? I mean, that works well and isn't shady.



You simply can't do P2P video meetings in a performant way because videoconferencing a) still requires STUN and TURN servers due to NAT, firewalls, mobile, etc. and b) requires a server for bandwidth reasons once you get beyond 2-5 participants, since otherwise bandwidth is N^2 for N participants.

It's that simple.

Now, if someday NAT's and firewalls die so every device can receive connections from anywhere, and packet multicast across the internet becomes a thing, then this could probably change. But I don't think anybody sees either of those happening anytime in the next decade (or ever), for both technical and security reasons.


Because you haven’t written it yet!


It is a hard problem to solve. People earn bread making and scaling this stuff.




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