Hi everyone!
I'm working on a privacy-focused peer-to-peer messenger built on WebRTC, and I'm researching how WebRTC behaves in real-world conditions.
Rather than benchmarks or lab tests, I'm interested in hearing about your actual experience using WebRTC-based applications (Signal, Element, Jitsi, PeerTube, Brave Talk, browser P2P apps, or any others).
Some questions I'd love to hear your thoughts on:
- Have you experienced random disconnects during calls or chats?
- Do connections fail more often on mobile networks, public Wi-Fi, or behind strict firewalls?
- Have you noticed problems when switching between Wi-Fi and cellular data?
- Do you frequently end up using relay servers instead of direct P2P connections?
- Have you encountered NAT or firewall issues that made WebRTC unusable?
- Have you ever had a WebRTC application work perfectly for one person but fail completely for another?
- Are there any recurring issues that you think developers tend to overlook?
If you're a developer, I'd also be interested in hearing about the most difficult networking problems you've encountered while building or maintaining WebRTC applications.
I'm especially interested in reliability under poor or restrictive network conditions, since one of my goals is to improve connection resilience while preserving privacy.
Thanks in advance to everyone willing to share their experiences!
Sounds alright. Yeah, I'm asking because we have some wave of new accounts popping up in the Fediverse, promoting some entirely vibe-coded "privacy" or "selfhosting" stuff. And those aren't worth bothering because those regularly don't run.
I completely understand, and I actually agree with your point. I've been developing this project for about a year in my spare time outside of work. My goal isn't to build "just another messenger," but to give people a way to communicate without depending on infrastructure imposed by large companies, relying instead on trusted, peer-to-peer methods of communication.
And yes, I think we're seeing a lot of people who believe that if they have an idea and feed a prompt into an AI, the rest will somehow happen automatically. In reality, that's far from how software engineering works. Building something secure and reliable still requires a lot of research, design, testing, and iteration.
My product isn't perfect yet, but I'm constantly learning and adopting technologies that can make it more secure, more reliable, and more accessible.
And thank you for taking the time to share your experience with WebRTC and the issues you've encountered. Feedback from people who have actually worked with the technology is genuinely valuable to me.