{"slug": "iroh", "name": "Iroh", "category": "networking", "category_name": "Networking and VPN", "description": "Open-source Rust library for direct, encrypted peer-to-peer QUIC connections with NAT hole punching.", "recommenders": 17, "commenters": 28, "warners": 3, "score": 15.038, "rising": 1.07, "first": "2026-01-11", "latest": "2026-10-30", "why": "Liked as a Rust library that gets devices behind NAT talking directly over encrypted peer-to-peer connections, with a simple API that commenters have built side projects and production systems on.", "why_is_quote": false, "has_verdict": true, "sentiment": {"recommend": 18, "neutral": 5, "compare": 3, "warn": 3}, "spark": [0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 1, 0, 8, 3, 1, 0, 4], "listed": true, "loved": ["NAT traversal", "Enables projects"], "caveat": "Unreliable connectivity", "short_quote": "The API is simple and easy to use.  It took no time to write a reliable system on top of Iroh.", "icon": true, "domain": "iroh.computer", "github_repo": null, "official_url": "https://iroh.computer", "pricing": "open source", "aliases": ["Iroh", "iroh"], "verdict": [{"text": "Liked as a Rust library that gets devices behind NAT talking directly over encrypted peer-to-peer connections", "cites": [{"id": 776703744, "item_id": 48543984, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48543984", "by": "colinmarc", "date": "2026-06-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "We use Iroh in production at work, and I'm absolutely in love with it.", "excerpt": "We use Iroh in production at work, and I'm absolutely in love with it. I'd describe it primarily as \"Tailscale-style hole punching as a rust crate\", but of course you can sprinkle a lot of cool p2p stuff on top of the basic QUIC connections.", "context": "uses it in production at work", "use_case": "p2p hole punching, QUIC connections", "switched_from": "", "story": "Iroh 1.0"}, {"id": 745329793, "item_id": 46583112, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46583112", "by": "Imustaskforhelp", "date": "2026-01-11", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Iroh is so sane, it can run directly on top of ipv4 itself and talk directly if possible but it can even break through nats", "excerpt": "Oh yeah this is a really funny story considering what thread we are on, but I remember asking chatgpt or claude or gemini or anything xD to make QTM work and none of them could figure out But I think in the end what ended up working was my frustration took over and I just copy pasted the commands from readme and if I remember correctly, they just worked. This is really ironical considering on what thread we are on bu", "context": "", "use_case": "peer-to-peer connectivity", "switched_from": "", "story": "2026 is the Year of Self-hosting"}, {"id": 799344944, "item_id": 49959059, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49959059", "by": "toomim", "date": "2026-10-04", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I'm most excited about https over iroh.", "excerpt": "For this stuff, I'm most excited about https over iroh. - https://github.com/aflin/iroh-webproxy - https://github.com/n0-computer/iroh-proxy-utils No port forwarding. No public IP required. No special proxy to set up. Iroh already runs public relays. Your two computers will signal through those, and then port-knock and form a direct connection to each other, perfectly encrypted. We just need to define a new https:// ", "context": "", "use_case": "tunneling without port forwarding", "switched_from": "", "story": "Self-hosted HTTP tunnels with SSH and Nginx"}]}, {"text": ", with a simple API that commenters have built side projects and production systems on.", "cites": [{"id": 776797664, "item_id": 48549854, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48549854", "by": "aag", "date": "2026-06-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "The API is simple and easy to use.  It took no time to write a reliable system on top of Iroh.", "excerpt": "For a side project, I used Iroh to give my web server in the cloud the ability to print directly to my label printer at home. The API is simple and easy to use. It took no time to write a reliable system on top of Iroh.", "context": "side project", "use_case": "cloud server printing to home printer", "switched_from": "", "story": "Iroh 1.0"}, {"id": 776703537, "item_id": 48543971, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48543971", "by": "colinmarc", "date": "2026-06-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "we use the latter in production at work.", "excerpt": "Not affiliated, but I am a very happy user of Tailscale and a very happy user of Iroh; we use the latter in production at work. Tailscale is a great service that happens to be open source, but Iroh is clearly structured as a library that you can build into whatever you want.", "context": "uses it in production at work", "use_case": "p2p networking in production", "switched_from": "", "story": "Iroh 1.0"}, {"id": 776739488, "item_id": 48546218, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48546218", "by": "Kazik24", "date": "2026-06-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "It's a great library.", "excerpt": "I've been using iroh for a while now for personal projects. I wrote an utility for sharing locally running services with others: https://github.com/Kazik24/server_share Glad I can finally update to 1.0. It's a great library.", "context": "", "use_case": "personal projects networking", "switched_from": "", "story": "Iroh 1.0"}]}, {"text": " The most common caveats are that connectivity can still be unreliable in practice", "cites": [{"id": 801600400, "item_id": 50100025, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50100025", "by": "synctext", "date": "2026-10-15", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Cool stuff, we stress tested it a while ago and it somewhat worked.", "excerpt": "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 wh", "context": "university networking researcher", "use_case": "NAT puncturing and overlay networking", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: Flipflop \u2013 Iroh-powered persistent tunnels for filesharing"}, {"id": 796066211, "item_id": 49754138, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49754138", "by": "skeledrew", "date": "2026-09-18", "stance": "warn", "quote": "the networking bit (using iroh, which is implemented in Rust) has been a constant pain that I have to keep returning to", "excerpt": "This sounds like my experience switching from conda to uv. The speed seriously blew my mind, and sometimes still does today. But then I think about the tradeoffs: I've encountered issues with uv-packaged Python because they've optimized the heck out of it, like a few months ago I was working with tkinter and things were failing hard on ways I couldn't understand, then I switched to conda for those projects and... thi", "context": "", "use_case": "networking", "switched_from": "", "story": "Flet 1.0 \u2013 Build cross-platform apps in Python"}]}, {"text": " and that it is unclear how it differs from Tailscale.", "cites": [{"id": 777595824, "item_id": 48599739, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48599739", "by": "kkapelon", "date": "2026-06-19", "stance": "warn", "quote": "This just tells me that the marketing site doesn't explain what Iroh actually does.", "excerpt": "The goal posts keep moving. First iroh was marketed as \"solves communication behind NAT\". Then we went to application level NAT busting vs node level NAT busting. Then we went to distributed vs client-server, then we went to stable IPs for non-server devices (your original comment). Now we moved to \"true peer to peer\" and \"public keys\". This just tells me that the marketing site doesn't explain what Iroh actually doe", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Iroh 1.0"}, {"id": 776773744, "item_id": 48548359, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48548359", "by": "protocolture", "date": "2026-06-15", "stance": "compare", "quote": "This doesn't really make a lot of sense. Assuming this is true, its equally likely to be my gateway, or BGP peer IP that breaks.", "excerpt": "> IP addresses can break, without warning, and it's outside of your device's control. Keys, however, are created & controlled by you. This doesn't really make a lot of sense. Assuming this is true, its equally likely to be my gateway, or BGP peer IP that breaks. How Iroh offers anything in this scenario is beyond me. >The power of that key can't be overstated. We use it to secure the connection. And because all data ", "context": "", "use_case": "key-based connectivity", "switched_from": "", "story": "Iroh 1.0"}]}], "praise": [{"label": "NAT traversal", "summary": "Connects machines behind NAT without port forwarding or a public IP.", "quotes": [{"id": 799344944, "item_id": 49959059, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49959059", "by": "toomim", "date": "2026-10-04", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I'm most excited about https over iroh.", "excerpt": "For this stuff, I'm most excited about https over iroh. - https://github.com/aflin/iroh-webproxy - https://github.com/n0-computer/iroh-proxy-utils No port forwarding. No public IP required. No special proxy to set up. Iroh already runs public relays. Your two computers will signal through those, and then port-knock and form a direct connection to each other, perfectly encrypted. We just need to define a new https:// ", "context": "", "use_case": "tunneling without port forwarding", "switched_from": "", "story": "Self-hosted HTTP tunnels with SSH and Nginx"}, {"id": 777397953, "item_id": 48587372, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48587372", "by": "wronex", "date": "2026-06-18", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Now we can push directly to a shared repo running on an old computer behind NAT. All for free.", "excerpt": "Me and my friend wanted git for a game project. Setting up a VPN for this felt overkill. Turns out git provides a very nice transport abstraction though. So I built an iroh transport for git. Now we can push directly to a shared repo running on an old computer behind NAT. All for free. https://github.com/wronex/iroh-git", "context": "", "use_case": "peer-to-peer git transport", "switched_from": "", "story": "Iroh 1.0"}, {"id": 801781904, "item_id": 50111369, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50111369", "by": "nozzlegear", "date": "2026-10-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I've also been using Iroh lately, it's pretty neat.", "excerpt": "I've also been using Iroh lately, it's pretty neat. I use it to create a connection between my Mac and a pi that I shoved in a closet on an isolated network. The pi reads my house's electric and water meters with an rtl sdr device, and the Mac connects to it every 30 minutes or so to grab and record the latest readings. The pi doesn't have a stable ip (or, I didn't set it up with one), so the Mac uses an Iroh ticket ", "context": "", "use_case": "connecting Mac to Raspberry Pi", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: Flipflop \u2013 Iroh-powered persistent tunnels for filesharing"}]}, {"label": "Enables projects", "summary": "Many commenters credit it as the foundation for their own tools and apps.", "quotes": [{"id": 780871953, "item_id": 48804497, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48804497", "by": "dfish", "date": "2026-07-06", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "without iroh this project would have not been possible!", "excerpt": "Hello! dev here. Yes, we did use claude, somewhat. We do give a lot of credit to iroh. Check the description of the repo. As per the AI stuff, rayfish is a very old idea. I had a lot of sketches on how a p2p mesh VPN should look like. So it started off as \"hey claude, can you do this?\" and of course because I use it I have to do a lot of things manually myself. But of course, without iroh this project would have not ", "context": "", "use_case": "networking foundation", "switched_from": "", "story": "Rayfish, Peer-to-peer mesh VPN with no server to trust"}, {"id": 785058289, "item_id": 49066143, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49066143", "by": "Imustaskforhelp", "date": "2026-07-27", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I love what people are building on iroh wow!", "excerpt": "This is really awesome, I love what people are building on iroh wow! because its built on iroh I feel like it could be possible to even extend this so that for example, we could share files over an excalidraw/lexidraw instance as well or just so many other opportunities in general as well that we can think of :)", "context": "", "use_case": "peer-to-peer networking", "switched_from": "", "story": "Lexidraw: Excalidraw fork with collaborative editing powered by iroh"}, {"id": 801643313, "item_id": 50102707, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50102707", "by": "agun", "date": "2026-10-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "It\u2019s all Rust, on QUIC via iroh. All the tech we love and trust.", "excerpt": "Hi HN, we've been working on building deCDN for the last 6 months, and we're excited to share our progress! Inspired by BitTorrent and IPFS, we wanted to build a decentralised CDN. Every piece hash-checked, but with someone always there to serve it, so it can actually act as a reliable CDN. So, we swapped BitTorrent's tit-for-tat trade for a pay-for-tat model, but with instant off-chain payments in stablecoins. It\u2019s ", "context": "", "use_case": "networking layer", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: deCDN \u2013 a peer-to-peer CDN where every piece is BLAKE3-verified"}]}, {"label": "Simple API", "summary": "The library is described as easy to use and quick to build reliable systems on.", "quotes": [{"id": 776797664, "item_id": 48549854, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48549854", "by": "aag", "date": "2026-06-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "The API is simple and easy to use.  It took no time to write a reliable system on top of Iroh.", "excerpt": "For a side project, I used Iroh to give my web server in the cloud the ability to print directly to my label printer at home. The API is simple and easy to use. It took no time to write a reliable system on top of Iroh.", "context": "side project", "use_case": "cloud server printing to home printer", "switched_from": "", "story": "Iroh 1.0"}, {"id": 776789520, "item_id": 48549345, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48549345", "by": "syllogistic", "date": "2026-06-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Wiring up the iroh half went smoothly, very much enjoying working with the library.", "excerpt": "> when will iroh support webrtc... This would give you a native iroh node that also speaks webrtc but I find that what folks want is for browsers to participate as peers. I build p2claw, p2p for self-hosted web apps, and ended up doing both halves separately. Box to box is iroh, although I use my own coordinator service and run my own iroh relay. Browser to box is webrtc with a service worker that makes the browser a", "context": "builds p2claw, p2p for self-hosted web apps", "use_case": "box to box p2p connections", "switched_from": "", "story": "Iroh 1.0"}, {"id": 776739488, "item_id": 48546218, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48546218", "by": "Kazik24", "date": "2026-06-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "It's a great library.", "excerpt": "I've been using iroh for a while now for personal projects. I wrote an utility for sharing locally running services with others: https://github.com/Kazik24/server_share Glad I can finally update to 1.0. It's a great library.", "context": "", "use_case": "personal projects networking", "switched_from": "", "story": "Iroh 1.0"}]}, {"label": "Embeddable Tailscale", "summary": "Seen as Tailscale-style hole punching packaged as a library you build into apps.", "quotes": [{"id": 776703744, "item_id": 48543984, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48543984", "by": "colinmarc", "date": "2026-06-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "We use Iroh in production at work, and I'm absolutely in love with it.", "excerpt": "We use Iroh in production at work, and I'm absolutely in love with it. I'd describe it primarily as \"Tailscale-style hole punching as a rust crate\", but of course you can sprinkle a lot of cool p2p stuff on top of the basic QUIC connections.", "context": "uses it in production at work", "use_case": "p2p hole punching, QUIC connections", "switched_from": "", "story": "Iroh 1.0"}, {"id": 776703537, "item_id": 48543971, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48543971", "by": "colinmarc", "date": "2026-06-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "we use the latter in production at work.", "excerpt": "Not affiliated, but I am a very happy user of Tailscale and a very happy user of Iroh; we use the latter in production at work. Tailscale is a great service that happens to be open source, but Iroh is clearly structured as a library that you can build into whatever you want.", "context": "uses it in production at work", "use_case": "p2p networking in production", "switched_from": "", "story": "Iroh 1.0"}, {"id": 781106852, "item_id": 48819178, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48819178", "by": "theturtletalks", "date": "2026-07-07", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "powered by Iroh[2] which will replace the need for Tailscale", "excerpt": "I built something similar by forking Vibetunnel[0] and turned into a Next.js app that runs on my laptop. Then I connect my laptop and phone to the same Tailscale network and use the 100.xx on my phone to access the same application on my phone. Your app is better than the web app I have since it's native, but we still need to use your CLI and daemon to work. Would be really nice if you supported Tailscale. Also take ", "context": "", "use_case": "peer-to-peer connectivity", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: Shellular \u2013 run Claude Code, Codex, Pi from your phone"}]}, {"label": "Production use", "summary": "Some commenters run it in production at work and are very happy with it.", "quotes": [{"id": 776703744, "item_id": 48543984, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48543984", "by": "colinmarc", "date": "2026-06-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "We use Iroh in production at work, and I'm absolutely in love with it.", "excerpt": "We use Iroh in production at work, and I'm absolutely in love with it. I'd describe it primarily as \"Tailscale-style hole punching as a rust crate\", but of course you can sprinkle a lot of cool p2p stuff on top of the basic QUIC connections.", "context": "uses it in production at work", "use_case": "p2p hole punching, QUIC connections", "switched_from": "", "story": "Iroh 1.0"}, {"id": 776703537, "item_id": 48543971, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48543971", "by": "colinmarc", "date": "2026-06-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "we use the latter in production at work.", "excerpt": "Not affiliated, but I am a very happy user of Tailscale and a very happy user of Iroh; we use the latter in production at work. Tailscale is a great service that happens to be open source, but Iroh is clearly structured as a library that you can build into whatever you want.", "context": "uses it in production at work", "use_case": "p2p networking in production", "switched_from": "", "story": "Iroh 1.0"}]}], "caveats": [{"label": "Unreliable connectivity", "summary": "Stress testing found it only somewhat worked, and one user called its networking a constant pain.", "quotes": [{"id": 801600400, "item_id": 50100025, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50100025", "by": "synctext", "date": "2026-10-15", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Cool stuff, we stress tested it a while ago and it somewhat worked.", "excerpt": "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 wh", "context": "university networking researcher", "use_case": "NAT puncturing and overlay networking", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: Flipflop \u2013 Iroh-powered persistent tunnels for filesharing"}, {"id": 796066211, "item_id": 49754138, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49754138", "by": "skeledrew", "date": "2026-09-18", "stance": "warn", "quote": "the networking bit (using iroh, which is implemented in Rust) has been a constant pain that I have to keep returning to", "excerpt": "This sounds like my experience switching from conda to uv. The speed seriously blew my mind, and sometimes still does today. But then I think about the tradeoffs: I've encountered issues with uv-packaged Python because they've optimized the heck out of it, like a few months ago I was working with tkinter and things were failing hard on ways I couldn't understand, then I switched to conda for those projects and... thi", "context": "", "use_case": "networking", "switched_from": "", "story": "Flet 1.0 \u2013 Build cross-platform apps in Python"}]}, {"label": "Unclear positioning", "summary": "Some found the marketing vague about what it does and how it differs from Tailscale.", "quotes": [{"id": 777595824, "item_id": 48599739, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48599739", "by": "kkapelon", "date": "2026-06-19", "stance": "warn", "quote": "This just tells me that the marketing site doesn't explain what Iroh actually does.", "excerpt": "The goal posts keep moving. First iroh was marketed as \"solves communication behind NAT\". Then we went to application level NAT busting vs node level NAT busting. Then we went to distributed vs client-server, then we went to stable IPs for non-server devices (your original comment). Now we moved to \"true peer to peer\" and \"public keys\". This just tells me that the marketing site doesn't explain what Iroh actually doe", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Iroh 1.0"}, {"id": 776773744, "item_id": 48548359, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48548359", "by": "protocolture", "date": "2026-06-15", "stance": "compare", "quote": "This doesn't really make a lot of sense. Assuming this is true, its equally likely to be my gateway, or BGP peer IP that breaks.", "excerpt": "> IP addresses can break, without warning, and it's outside of your device's control. Keys, however, are created & controlled by you. This doesn't really make a lot of sense. Assuming this is true, its equally likely to be my gateway, or BGP peer IP that breaks. How Iroh offers anything in this scenario is beyond me. >The power of that key can't be overstated. We use it to secure the connection. And because all data ", "context": "", "use_case": "key-based connectivity", "switched_from": "", "story": "Iroh 1.0"}]}, {"label": "Transport limits", "summary": "LoRa is blocked by its datagram limit, custom transports are unfinished, and kernel WireGuard is faster for bulk throughput.", "quotes": [{"id": 801661488, "item_id": 50103843, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50103843", "by": "tamimio", "date": "2026-10-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I have been building few things on top of iroh past few weeks and I love it", "excerpt": "Looks very interesting, I have been building few things on top of iroh past few weeks and I love it, from the ability to run it on some iot all the way to be rf agnostic (almost, can\u2019t use LoRa with iroh due to its datagram limit), and best part, MoQ runs natively on iroh where on wireguard you will need to encrypt twice so more cpu, but i found kernel wireguard performs better at bulk throughput, and layer 3 isn\u2019t b", "context": "", "use_case": "building networked tools", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: Flipflop \u2013 Iroh-powered persistent tunnels for filesharing"}, {"id": 776696081, "item_id": 48543505, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48543505", "by": "forsalebypwner", "date": "2026-06-15", "stance": "compare", "quote": "But I might check this out for the transports part in particular.", "excerpt": "Their use of addressing by keys instead of by IPs seems to be the main differentiator. Also the support for custom transports (BLE, LoRa, Tor) which appears to be in progress and not yet fully implemented. I love Tailscale, it's deployed on all my devices. But I might check this out for the transports part in particular.", "context": "", "use_case": "custom transports", "switched_from": "", "story": "Iroh 1.0"}]}, {"label": "Python via FFI", "summary": "Python support goes through FFI, which did not fit one user's portable executable build.", "quotes": [{"id": 776775120, "item_id": 48548445, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48548445", "by": "bear330", "date": "2026-06-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I am planning add Iroh into my daily used https P2P tool", "excerpt": "It's very cool! I am planning add Iroh into my daily used https P2P tool (https://github.com/nuwainfo/ffl) which currently using WebRTC. It's very cool to support both protocols, but it seems like Iroh python support is via FFI which can't be used in my APE (Actual Portable Executable) build...thinking...", "context": "", "use_case": "p2p file transfer", "switched_from": "", "story": "Iroh 1.0"}]}, {"label": "Relies on relays", "summary": "It depends on relay servers, which you can self-host, and one critic sees it as a workaround for NAT.", "quotes": [{"id": 801600400, "item_id": 50100025, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50100025", "by": "synctext", "date": "2026-10-15", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Cool stuff, we stress tested it a while ago and it somewhat worked.", "excerpt": "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 wh", "context": "university networking researcher", "use_case": "NAT puncturing and overlay networking", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: Flipflop \u2013 Iroh-powered persistent tunnels for filesharing"}, {"id": 804782065, "item_id": 50298879, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50298879", "by": "spauldo", "date": "2026-10-30", "stance": "warn", "quote": "it's just a hack to get around problems that NAT has caused", "excerpt": "I'm well familiar with DynDNS. I used to run it before I got a real domain. It can't tell the difference between my laptop and my workstation, since they're both behind the same IP. I wasn't aware of iroh, but having looked it up, it's just a hack to get around problems that NAT has caused. And yes, Dropbox does exist because of NAT, or more generally the fact that \"consumers\" are second-class citizens on the Interne", "context": "", "use_case": "NAT traversal", "switched_from": "", "story": "If IPv4 were land"}]}], "who": [{"by": "synctext", "context": "university networking researcher", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50100025", "date": "2026-10-15"}, {"by": "aag", "context": "side project", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48549854", "date": "2026-06-15"}, {"by": "syllogistic", "context": "builds p2claw, p2p for self-hosted web apps", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48549345", "date": "2026-06-15"}, {"by": "colinmarc", "context": "uses it in production at work", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48543984", "date": "2026-06-15"}], "tags": ["for Rust developers", "for self-hosting", "for IoT devices", "for P2P file sharing", "used in production"], "use_cases": ["peer-to-peer connectivity", "networking foundation", "nat traversal", "hole-punching connectivity", "connecting mac to raspberry pi", "building networked tools"], "compared": [{"slug": "tailscale", "name": "Tailscale", "co": 10, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "claude", "name": "Claude", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "wireguard", "name": "WireGuard", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}], "makers": [{"id": 776843152, "item_id": 48552697, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48552697", "by": "rklaehn", "date": "2026-06-16", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "We are able to saturate a 1 GiB link from a normal desktop PC or good phone", "excerpt": "I think we do very well with devices devices with limited bandwidth and changing connections. We are able to saturate a 1 GiB link from a normal desktop PC or good phone, but have some work to do to saturate a 10 GiB link with a single process. We don't have a comparison benchmark, but we are fast enough that we are not the limiting factor for many use cases. In many cases the performance bottleneck is the interface ", "context": "", "use_case": "p2p QUIC networking", "switched_from": "", "story": "Iroh 1.0"}, {"id": 776835777, "item_id": 48552236, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48552236", "by": "rklaehn", "date": "2026-06-16", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "We wrote a small demo app called sendme to show off iroh.", "excerpt": "We wrote a small demo app called sendme to show off iroh. It is cli only, works on all operating systems that we use internally, and we frequently use it to send around qlog files: https://www.iroh.computer/sendme There are several projects inspired by sendme that use the same protocol but add mobile device support and a GUI: https://www.altsendme.com/en https://github.com/ARK-Builders/Drop-Desktop https://github.com", "context": "iroh developer", "use_case": "p2p connectivity", "switched_from": "", "story": "Iroh 1.0"}, {"id": 776834320, "item_id": 48552145, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48552145", "by": "rklaehn", "date": "2026-06-16", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Iroh 0-rtt is very lightweight.", "excerpt": "I love mainline and also really appreciate how lightweight it is by just using UDP packets. But UDP packets have their limits. With the maximum MTU you can expect to work, the payload can't be more than about 1000 bytes, which is the limit of bep_0044. But there are some use cases where you want to store a bit more than 1000 bytes. Not giant amounts, but maybe 4 KiB. Mainline won't ever be able to do this. Iroh 0-rtt", "context": "", "use_case": "peer-to-peer networking", "switched_from": "", "story": "Iroh 1.0"}, {"id": 776828912, "item_id": 48551807, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48551807", "by": "rklaehn", "date": "2026-06-16", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "That is also why we are relatively confident regarding encryption security. It is just TLS.", "excerpt": "At the lowest level it is a creative way to leverage all the work the major cloud vendors have poured into QUIC for p2p connections. If you look at an iroh connection in wireshark it is just a QUIC connection. If you configure a SSLKEYLOGFILE so wireshark can actually look into the packets, you will see a few TLS extensions and somewhat unusual packets flying by during the handshake, but once established it is a comp", "context": "", "use_case": "p2p connections over QUIC", "switched_from": "", "story": "Iroh 1.0"}, {"id": 776811648, "item_id": 48550728, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48550728", "by": "rklaehn", "date": "2026-06-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Iroh is a library that is made to embed into your application", "excerpt": "I work on iroh. On the technical level, the biggest difference is probably that we build on QUIC whereas tailscale builds on wireguard. Iroh is a library that is made to embed into your application, whereas the tailscale offering started as a daemon. It allows embedding, but you are still carrying the baggage of a go runtime. Iroh is written in rust. Rust compiles to a native library and is therefore easier and more ", "context": "works on iroh", "use_case": "embeddable p2p networking", "switched_from": "", "story": "Iroh 1.0"}, {"id": 776717616, "item_id": 48544851, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48544851", "by": "rklaehn", "date": "2026-06-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "If you work on native mobile apps or embedded devices, iroh will be better since it is pretty frugal.", "excerpt": "Holepunch, formerly hypercore, formerly dat, is a great project. Their main language is js, which makes it difficult to embed into anything but js/ts applications. Also, they are very principled when it comes to peer to peer purity, whereas iroh is a bit more pragmatic. We use dedicated relays to faciliate hole punching, whereas holepunch tries to use other peers as a temporary relay for hole punching messages. Anoth", "context": "", "use_case": "p2p networking", "switched_from": "", "story": "Iroh 1.0"}], "threads": [{"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48542480", "title": "Iroh 1.0", "mentions": 26}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50099136", "title": "Show HN: Flipflop \u2013 Iroh-powered persistent tunnels for filesharing", "mentions": 3}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48746038", "title": "Rayfish, Peer-to-peer mesh VPN with no server to trust", "mentions": 3}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50287775", "title": "If IPv4 were land", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50205934", "title": "Disney Raising Prices Days After Confirming Ads Will Now Show Up on Every Tier", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50102699", "title": "Show HN: deCDN \u2013 a peer-to-peer CDN where every piece is BLAKE3-verified", "mentions": 1}], "sentiment_by_month": {"2025-11": {}, "2025-12": {}, "2026-01": {"recommend": 1}, "2026-02": {}, "2026-03": {}, "2026-04": {"recommend": 1}, "2026-05": {}, "2026-06": {"compare": 2, "recommend": 8, "neutral": 1, "warn": 1}, "2026-07": {"neutral": 1, "recommend": 3}, "2026-08": {"recommend": 1, "compare": 1}, "2026-09": {"neutral": 1, "warn": 1}, "2026-10": {"recommend": 4, "neutral": 2, "warn": 1}}, "quotes": [{"id": 804782065, "item_id": 50298879, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50298879", "by": "spauldo", "date": "2026-10-30", "stance": "warn", "quote": "it's just a hack to get around problems that NAT has caused", "excerpt": "I'm well familiar with DynDNS. I used to run it before I got a real domain. It can't tell the difference between my laptop and my workstation, since they're both behind the same IP. I wasn't aware of iroh, but having looked it up, it's just a hack to get around problems that NAT has caused. And yes, Dropbox does exist because of NAT, or more generally the fact that \"consumers\" are second-class citizens on the Interne", "context": "", "use_case": "NAT traversal", "switched_from": "", "story": "If IPv4 were land"}, {"id": 804077650, "item_id": 50254853, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50254853", "by": "knowaveragejoe", "date": "2026-10-27", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Not to mention Iroh is in the mix now too.", "excerpt": "I use jellyfin remotely with tailscale. It was trivial to set up. There's probably a dozen other holepunching mesh VPN approaches that would also work. Not to mention Iroh is in the mix now too.", "context": "", "use_case": "hole-punching connectivity", "switched_from": "", "story": "Disney Raising Prices Days After Confirming Ads Will Now Show Up on Every Tier"}, {"id": 801781904, "item_id": 50111369, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50111369", "by": "nozzlegear", "date": "2026-10-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I've also been using Iroh lately, it's pretty neat.", "excerpt": "I've also been using Iroh lately, it's pretty neat. I use it to create a connection between my Mac and a pi that I shoved in a closet on an isolated network. The pi reads my house's electric and water meters with an rtl sdr device, and the Mac connects to it every 30 minutes or so to grab and record the latest readings. The pi doesn't have a stable ip (or, I didn't set it up with one), so the Mac uses an Iroh ticket ", "context": "", "use_case": "connecting Mac to Raspberry Pi", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: Flipflop \u2013 Iroh-powered persistent tunnels for filesharing"}, {"id": 801661488, "item_id": 50103843, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50103843", "by": "tamimio", "date": "2026-10-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I have been building few things on top of iroh past few weeks and I love it", "excerpt": "Looks very interesting, I have been building few things on top of iroh past few weeks and I love it, from the ability to run it on some iot all the way to be rf agnostic (almost, can\u2019t use LoRa with iroh due to its datagram limit), and best part, MoQ runs natively on iroh where on wireguard you will need to encrypt twice so more cpu, but i found kernel wireguard performs better at bulk throughput, and layer 3 isn\u2019t b", "context": "", "use_case": "building networked tools", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: Flipflop \u2013 Iroh-powered persistent tunnels for filesharing"}, {"id": 801643313, "item_id": 50102707, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50102707", "by": "agun", "date": "2026-10-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "It\u2019s all Rust, on QUIC via iroh. All the tech we love and trust.", "excerpt": "Hi HN, we've been working on building deCDN for the last 6 months, and we're excited to share our progress! Inspired by BitTorrent and IPFS, we wanted to build a decentralised CDN. Every piece hash-checked, but with someone always there to serve it, so it can actually act as a reliable CDN. So, we swapped BitTorrent's tit-for-tat trade for a pay-for-tat model, but with instant off-chain payments in stablecoins. It\u2019s ", "context": "", "use_case": "networking layer", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: deCDN \u2013 a peer-to-peer CDN where every piece is BLAKE3-verified"}, {"id": 801600400, "item_id": 50100025, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50100025", "by": "synctext", "date": "2026-10-15", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Cool stuff, we stress tested it a while ago and it somewhat worked.", "excerpt": "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 wh", "context": "university networking researcher", "use_case": "NAT puncturing and overlay networking", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: Flipflop \u2013 Iroh-powered persistent tunnels for filesharing"}, {"id": 799344944, "item_id": 49959059, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49959059", "by": "toomim", "date": "2026-10-04", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I'm most excited about https over iroh.", "excerpt": "For this stuff, I'm most excited about https over iroh. - https://github.com/aflin/iroh-webproxy - https://github.com/n0-computer/iroh-proxy-utils No port forwarding. No public IP required. No special proxy to set up. Iroh already runs public relays. Your two computers will signal through those, and then port-knock and form a direct connection to each other, perfectly encrypted. We just need to define a new https:// ", "context": "", "use_case": "tunneling without port forwarding", "switched_from": "", "story": "Self-hosted HTTP tunnels with SSH and Nginx"}, {"id": 796066211, "item_id": 49754138, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49754138", "by": "skeledrew", "date": "2026-09-18", "stance": "warn", "quote": "the networking bit (using iroh, which is implemented in Rust) has been a constant pain that I have to keep returning to", "excerpt": "This sounds like my experience switching from conda to uv. The speed seriously blew my mind, and sometimes still does today. But then I think about the tradeoffs: I've encountered issues with uv-packaged Python because they've optimized the heck out of it, like a few months ago I was working with tkinter and things were failing hard on ways I couldn't understand, then I switched to conda for those projects and... thi", "context": "", "use_case": "networking", "switched_from": "", "story": "Flet 1.0 \u2013 Build cross-platform apps in Python"}, {"id": 795655313, "item_id": 49728457, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49728457", "by": "bilaly", "date": "2026-09-16", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "iroh gives IPs under public key to who access your hosted session.", "excerpt": "Discord is banned from T\u00fcrkiye since 9 october 2024. And talking from your device is a must for gaming, tiny-projects management, chatting with friends. I decided to create a voice chat app that works on terminal, no login required, no server in the middle. The first one to host session becomes coordinator and they talk in between by a mesh between the room. Tincan which comes from tincan phones from our childhoods. ", "context": "", "use_case": "peer-to-peer connectivity", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: Tincan \u2013 terminal voice chat with no server in the middle"}, {"id": 791265120, "item_id": 49454070, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49454070", "by": "megamorf", "date": "2026-08-26", "stance": "compare", "quote": "So this is somewhat similar to Iroh?", "excerpt": "So this is somewhat similar to Iroh? https://github.com/n0-computer/iroh", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Tailcat \u2013 Like netcat, but over Tailscale\u2019s data plane"}, {"id": 790827090, "item_id": 49426693, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49426693", "by": "stavros", "date": "2026-08-24", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I really wish Moonlight would use Iroh.", "excerpt": "I really wish Moonlight would use Iroh. I use Tailscale to make it work, but it would be so much easier to just pair a machine and have it always work.", "context": "", "use_case": "peer-to-peer connectivity", "switched_from": "", "story": "IPFS Maintainers Winding Down"}, {"id": 785058289, "item_id": 49066143, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49066143", "by": "Imustaskforhelp", "date": "2026-07-27", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I love what people are building on iroh wow!", "excerpt": "This is really awesome, I love what people are building on iroh wow! because its built on iroh I feel like it could be possible to even extend this so that for example, we could share files over an excalidraw/lexidraw instance as well or just so many other opportunities in general as well that we can think of :)", "context": "", "use_case": "peer-to-peer networking", "switched_from": "", "story": "Lexidraw: Excalidraw fork with collaborative editing powered by iroh"}, {"id": 781106852, "item_id": 48819178, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48819178", "by": "theturtletalks", "date": "2026-07-07", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "powered by Iroh[2] which will replace the need for Tailscale", "excerpt": "I built something similar by forking Vibetunnel[0] and turned into a Next.js app that runs on my laptop. Then I connect my laptop and phone to the same Tailscale network and use the 100.xx on my phone to access the same application on my phone. Your app is better than the web app I have since it's native, but we still need to use your CLI and daemon to work. Would be really nice if you supported Tailscale. Also take ", "context": "", "use_case": "peer-to-peer connectivity", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: Shellular \u2013 run Claude Code, Codex, Pi from your phone"}, {"id": 780873329, "item_id": 48804583, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48804583", "by": "dfish", "date": "2026-07-06", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "After the release of iroh v1 I decided to try out claude", "excerpt": "Hello. Yeah this is my secondary account. Main one is dgrr. I still dont do much there. I have projects in github.com/infinitefield and now rayfish. Indeed yes I do not use LLMs too much. Rayfish was a project we had pending for years and I had a lot of sketches about it in my obsidian folders. After the release of iroh v1 I decided to try out claude and prompt it to solve the problem. Still, there is a lot of boiler", "context": "", "use_case": "networking foundation", "switched_from": "", "story": "Rayfish, Peer-to-peer mesh VPN with no server to trust"}, {"id": 780871953, "item_id": 48804497, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48804497", "by": "dfish", "date": "2026-07-06", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "without iroh this project would have not been possible!", "excerpt": "Hello! dev here. Yes, we did use claude, somewhat. We do give a lot of credit to iroh. Check the description of the repo. As per the AI stuff, rayfish is a very old idea. I had a lot of sketches on how a p2p mesh VPN should look like. So it started off as \"hey claude, can you do this?\" and of course because I use it I have to do a lot of things manually myself. But of course, without iroh this project would have not ", "context": "", "use_case": "networking foundation", "switched_from": "", "story": "Rayfish, Peer-to-peer mesh VPN with no server to trust"}, {"id": 780769056, "item_id": 48798066, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48798066", "by": "apitman", "date": "2026-07-05", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Interesting to see this built on Iroh.", "excerpt": "Some other similar projects: https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling#overlay-networks-and-other-advanced-tools Interesting to see this built on Iroh.", "context": "", "use_case": "networking foundation", "switched_from": "", "story": "Rayfish, Peer-to-peer mesh VPN with no server to trust"}, {"id": 777595824, "item_id": 48599739, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48599739", "by": "kkapelon", "date": "2026-06-19", "stance": "warn", "quote": "This just tells me that the marketing site doesn't explain what Iroh actually does.", "excerpt": "The goal posts keep moving. First iroh was marketed as \"solves communication behind NAT\". Then we went to application level NAT busting vs node level NAT busting. Then we went to distributed vs client-server, then we went to stable IPs for non-server devices (your original comment). Now we moved to \"true peer to peer\" and \"public keys\". This just tells me that the marketing site doesn't explain what Iroh actually doe", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Iroh 1.0"}, {"id": 777397953, "item_id": 48587372, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48587372", "by": "wronex", "date": "2026-06-18", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Now we can push directly to a shared repo running on an old computer behind NAT. All for free.", "excerpt": "Me and my friend wanted git for a game project. Setting up a VPN for this felt overkill. Turns out git provides a very nice transport abstraction though. So I built an iroh transport for git. Now we can push directly to a shared repo running on an old computer behind NAT. All for free. https://github.com/wronex/iroh-git", "context": "", "use_case": "peer-to-peer git transport", "switched_from": "", "story": "Iroh 1.0"}, {"id": 776797664, "item_id": 48549854, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48549854", "by": "aag", "date": "2026-06-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "The API is simple and easy to use.  It took no time to write a reliable system on top of Iroh.", "excerpt": "For a side project, I used Iroh to give my web server in the cloud the ability to print directly to my label printer at home. The API is simple and easy to use. It took no time to write a reliable system on top of Iroh.", "context": "side project", "use_case": "cloud server printing to home printer", "switched_from": "", "story": "Iroh 1.0"}, {"id": 776789520, "item_id": 48549345, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48549345", "by": "syllogistic", "date": "2026-06-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Wiring up the iroh half went smoothly, very much enjoying working with the library.", "excerpt": "> when will iroh support webrtc... This would give you a native iroh node that also speaks webrtc but I find that what folks want is for browsers to participate as peers. I build p2claw, p2p for self-hosted web apps, and ended up doing both halves separately. Box to box is iroh, although I use my own coordinator service and run my own iroh relay. Browser to box is webrtc with a service worker that makes the browser a", "context": "builds p2claw, p2p for self-hosted web apps", "use_case": "box to box p2p connections", "switched_from": "", "story": "Iroh 1.0"}, {"id": 776789152, "item_id": 48549322, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48549322", "by": "Ingon", "date": "2026-06-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I've been drawing a lot of inspiration from Iroh", "excerpt": "Amazing, congrats on the release. I've been drawing a lot of inspiration from Iroh, while working on my own https://github.com/connet-dev/connet. While peers in connet communicate peer to peer, I have a long way to cover peer discovery and transparent connection migration. \"Tailscale at the application layer, instead of the network layer\" (as sibling comment describes it) is a great way of thinking about it. In my mi", "context": "", "use_case": "p2p networking", "switched_from": "", "story": "Iroh 1.0"}, {"id": 776775120, "item_id": 48548445, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48548445", "by": "bear330", "date": "2026-06-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I am planning add Iroh into my daily used https P2P tool", "excerpt": "It's very cool! I am planning add Iroh into my daily used https P2P tool (https://github.com/nuwainfo/ffl) which currently using WebRTC. It's very cool to support both protocols, but it seems like Iroh python support is via FFI which can't be used in my APE (Actual Portable Executable) build...thinking...", "context": "", "use_case": "p2p file transfer", "switched_from": "", "story": "Iroh 1.0"}, {"id": 776773744, "item_id": 48548359, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48548359", "by": "protocolture", "date": "2026-06-15", "stance": "compare", "quote": "This doesn't really make a lot of sense. Assuming this is true, its equally likely to be my gateway, or BGP peer IP that breaks.", "excerpt": "> IP addresses can break, without warning, and it's outside of your device's control. Keys, however, are created & controlled by you. This doesn't really make a lot of sense. Assuming this is true, its equally likely to be my gateway, or BGP peer IP that breaks. How Iroh offers anything in this scenario is beyond me. >The power of that key can't be overstated. We use it to secure the connection. And because all data ", "context": "", "use_case": "key-based connectivity", "switched_from": "", "story": "Iroh 1.0"}, {"id": 776764353, "item_id": 48547772, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48547772", "by": "salgorithm", "date": "2026-06-15", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I made this a while back because I want an easy way to throw together games for family game nights.", "excerpt": "I setup a TypeScript SDK with some examples to test in the browser. SDK https://github.com/SalvatoreT/iroh-ts Examples - https://salvatoret.github.io/iroh-ts/examples/chat/ - https://salvatoret.github.io/iroh-ts/examples/debug/ - https://salvatoret.github.io/iroh-ts/examples/poker/ I made this a while back because I want an easy way to throw together games for family game nights.", "context": "", "use_case": "p2p browser games", "switched_from": "", "story": "Iroh 1.0"}, {"id": 776739488, "item_id": 48546218, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48546218", "by": "Kazik24", "date": "2026-06-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "It's a great library.", "excerpt": "I've been using iroh for a while now for personal projects. I wrote an utility for sharing locally running services with others: https://github.com/Kazik24/server_share Glad I can finally update to 1.0. It's a great library.", "context": "", "use_case": "personal projects networking", "switched_from": "", "story": "Iroh 1.0"}, {"id": 776717088, "item_id": 48544818, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48544818", "by": "ramoz", "date": "2026-06-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I think this tech (modern p2p) represents what agent-to-agent (a2a) should be built on.", "excerpt": "Ive been prototyping with Iroh for awhile. I think this tech (modern p2p) represents what agent-to-agent (a2a) should be built on. Every agent should be reachable to each other without hosting itself as an http server. related prototypes https://github.com/eqtylab/agentbeam https://github.com/eqtylab/real-a2a", "context": "", "use_case": "agent-to-agent networking", "switched_from": "", "story": "Iroh 1.0"}, {"id": 776703744, "item_id": 48543984, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48543984", "by": "colinmarc", "date": "2026-06-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "We use Iroh in production at work, and I'm absolutely in love with it.", "excerpt": "We use Iroh in production at work, and I'm absolutely in love with it. I'd describe it primarily as \"Tailscale-style hole punching as a rust crate\", but of course you can sprinkle a lot of cool p2p stuff on top of the basic QUIC connections.", "context": "uses it in production at work", "use_case": "p2p hole punching, QUIC connections", "switched_from": "", "story": "Iroh 1.0"}, {"id": 776703537, "item_id": 48543971, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48543971", "by": "colinmarc", "date": "2026-06-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "we use the latter in production at work.", "excerpt": "Not affiliated, but I am a very happy user of Tailscale and a very happy user of Iroh; we use the latter in production at work. Tailscale is a great service that happens to be open source, but Iroh is clearly structured as a library that you can build into whatever you want.", "context": "uses it in production at work", "use_case": "p2p networking in production", "switched_from": "", "story": "Iroh 1.0"}, {"id": 776696081, "item_id": 48543505, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48543505", "by": "forsalebypwner", "date": "2026-06-15", "stance": "compare", "quote": "But I might check this out for the transports part in particular.", "excerpt": "Their use of addressing by keys instead of by IPs seems to be the main differentiator. Also the support for custom transports (BLE, LoRa, Tor) which appears to be in progress and not yet fully implemented. I love Tailscale, it's deployed on all my devices. But I might check this out for the transports part in particular.", "context": "", "use_case": "custom transports", "switched_from": "", "story": "Iroh 1.0"}, {"id": 766516658, "item_id": 47907291, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47907291", "by": "satvikpendem", "date": "2026-04-25", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "they use iroh which is an open source secure peer to peer relay service", "excerpt": "Look into Sendme and AltSendme which is a GUI around the former, they use iroh which is an open source secure peer to peer relay service to send data so there are no limits whatsoever for sending and receiving files, because there's no central server.", "context": "", "use_case": "peer-to-peer transport", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: What file sharing apps do you guys use?"}, {"id": 745329793, "item_id": 46583112, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46583112", "by": "Imustaskforhelp", "date": "2026-01-11", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Iroh is so sane, it can run directly on top of ipv4 itself and talk directly if possible but it can even break through nats", "excerpt": "Oh yeah this is a really funny story considering what thread we are on, but I remember asking chatgpt or claude or gemini or anything xD to make QTM work and none of them could figure out But I think in the end what ended up working was my frustration took over and I just copy pasted the commands from readme and if I remember correctly, they just worked. This is really ironical considering on what thread we are on bu", "context": "", "use_case": "peer-to-peer connectivity", "switched_from": "", "story": "2026 is the Year of Self-hosting"}]}