Iroh-Blobs

Posted3 months agoActive2 months ago

janandonly

142 points

25 comments

iroh.computerTechstory

supportivepositive

Debate

20/100

Peer-to-Peer NetworkingDecentralized Data StorageQuic Protocol

Key topics

Peer-to-Peer Networking

Decentralized Data Storage

Quic Protocol

The Iroh team announces new features in their Iroh-blobs project, a peer-to-peer networking solution, sparking discussion about its potential, ease of use, and comparison to other technologies.

Snapshot generated from the HN discussion

Discussion Activity

Light discussion

First comment

11m

Peak period

2-3h

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Comment distribution25 data points

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Based on 25 loaded comments

Key moments

01Story posted
Oct 27, 2025 at 7:28 PM EDT
3 months ago
Step 01
02First comment
Oct 27, 2025 at 7:39 PM EDT
11m after posting
Step 02
03Peak activity
4 comments in 2-3h
Hottest window of the conversation
Step 03
04Latest activity
Oct 28, 2025 at 11:40 AM EDT
2 months ago
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Discussion (25 comments)

Showing 25 comments

throwup238

3 months ago

2 replies

[insert yet another comment about having short product introductions at the top pf blog posts]

From their docs page:

> Iroh lets you establish direct peer-to-peer connections whenever possible, falling back to relay servers if necessary. This gives you fast, reliable connections that are authenticated and encrypted end-to-end using QUIC.

umanwizard

3 months ago

4 replies

How does the use case differ from e.g. Tailscale?

ttul

3 months ago

2 replies

I'm going to guess that the difference is that Tailscale lets your machines find each other within a managed flat virtual network where as Iroh lets your applications talk to each other without any regard to which machine anything is running on.

udev4096

3 months ago

1 reply

Not sure about tailscale coordination server but once you establish connection to a headscale server, the clients don't strictly need headscale after that (although it's recommended to keep it active). So, maybe the only difference is headscale acts as a relay for once

John23832

2 months ago

1 reply

Headscale is just a open source implementation of the Tailscale coordination server.

The coordination server just provides the IPs by which you use wireguard to connect. It can see that metadata (what machines are in a tailnet), but not anything else.

udev4096

2 months ago

1 reply

I am well aware of what headscale is. Why would I even mention it if I didn't know about it? How about stop commenting just for the sake of it?

Coordination server does a lot apart from distributing IPs to the clients. Read the goddamn docs before spreading misinformation

John23832

2 months ago

> Not sure about tailscale coordination server but once you establish connection to a headscale server

I was responding to the context here.

> How about stop commenting just for the sake of it? Coordination server does a lot apart from distributing IPs to the clients.

But in general, lmao. Chill out bro.

edit: Looking through your comments, I see that this is common.

> Read the goddamn docs before spreading misinformation

https://tailscale.com/kb/1155/terminology-and-concepts#coord...

gear54rus

3 months ago

sounds like exactly the sort of thing missing from kde connect

xeonmc

3 months ago

1 reply

I’m also wondering if it’s possible to use MoQ from iroh, for streaming unidirectional broadcast data that don’t need historical buffers, mainly to freeload on Cloudflare’s free MoQ relays.

Also how do the public relays provides by Iroh compare with Tailscale’s public DERP servers, operationally wise?

flub

2 months ago

MoQ: yeah, MoQ runs on top of QUIC so you can run it on top of iroh. I think some version of this will happen sometime.

DERP: very similar. iroh relay servers were initially modelled on DERP, but are now diverging more and more.

derefr

2 months ago

Tailscale is a system service / DevOps deploy-time architectural middleware tool for putting entire devices onto managed OS-level networks.

Iroh is a development-time library for building software that forms open decentralized application-specific networks.

The closer comparison for Iroh would be to something like libp2p. (Or maybe libzmq, given its toolkit-of-very-well-thought-out-primitives approach. I might describe Iroh as the decentralized complement to libzmq.)

gbin

3 months ago

Or zenoh?

mudkipdev

3 months ago

and iroh-blobs: provides blob and blob sequence transfer support for iroh. It implements a simple request-response protocol based on BLAKE3 verified streaming

https://www.iroh.computer/proto/iroh-blobs

dangoodmanUT

3 months ago

1 reply

Iroh is fantastic.

I’ve been intending to play with it more, it’s given me so many little project ideas that otherwise would be a pain

b_fiive

3 months ago

delighted to hear! iroh-blobs is Rüdiger's love letter to BLAKE3, and hot dang has he taken this piece of machinery quite far. Much of this is covered in the post, but some highlights:

* fetch any sub-sequence of bytes, verified on send & receive * fetch sub-sequences of bytes in collections (sets of blobs / directories) * store on disk, inlining small blobs into the database for faster lookups * fan in from disk & the network * "multi-provider" fan in that can re-plan a fetch on the fly * should land support for WASM compilation (browsers) soon! https://github.com/n0-computer/iroh-blobs/pull/187

We're hard at work on making the API more ergonomic, but as a foundational protocol it's truly impressive. Rudi has been working with the BLAKE3 authors on both perf testing & the hazmat API.

disclosure: I work on iroh

vlovich123

3 months ago

1 reply

Is it just me or is the safe and “unsafe” versions of using the connection pool identical? Seems like a typo with a clone in the “correct” example that shouldn’t be there?

flub

2 months ago

1 reply

It's extremely subtle, fooled me initially too. The `fn handle_connection` takes a different argument, so rust `Derefs` the `ConnectionRef` into `Connection` for the first example. A bit too subtle to my liking.

vlovich123

2 months ago

Oh wow. Ok. Subtle and error prone. This screams for a more ergonomic API like not making Connection cloneable or doing as_ref instead of Deref or not decoupling the lifetime when you do a clone.

hovering_nox

2 months ago

2 replies

I tried to use Iroh but had a few problems.

It uses a third server to facilitate initial p2p connections but I keep loosing/fail to connect to this server. I don't know if it's because of many restarts during development or something else.

Windows Defender nukes this from orbit, making it nearly impossible to ship to clients in a trusting fashion. But I guess any program which punches through the firewall is suspect.

wongarsu

2 months ago

Windows Defender is an interesting challenge. It would be interesting to know if signing the executable has a positive effect here. At $previouscompany we had a software that looked very keylogger-like, and all our Windows Defender issues vanished once we started using EV codesigning certificates. They are not cheap ($300/year), but Defender seems to take the fact that the code is bound to a verified legal entity as a strong trust signal

flub

2 months ago

That's interesting, because the connection to the relay server is established using HTTP1.1 over TLS. Followed by a WebSocket upgrade. It should look like any other webserver connection on the internet. Could be worth investigating your network conditions and filing an issue for this.

edbaskerville

3 months ago

> One thing to keep in mind when using the connection pool: the connection pool needs the ability to track which connections are currently being used. To do this, the connection pool does not return Connection but ConnectionRef, a struct that derefs to Connection but contains some additional lifetime tracking.

> But Connection is Clone, so in principle there is nothing stopping you from cloning the wrapped connection and losing the lifetime tracking. Don't do this. If you work with connections from the pool, you should pass around either a ConnectionRef or a &Connection to make sure the underlying ConnectionRef stays alive.

Hmmm...

I'd like to see the incovenient API. Or maybe there's a bit more work that could be done to make it convenient? Is there an insurmountable problem that prevents completely hiding the underlying Connection?

Adam2025

3 months ago

Cool concept. Iroh-blobs look promising for decentralized data storage. Curious how it handles versioning and sync performance at scale.

mountainriver

3 months ago

Love Iroh to death, so glad to see it continue to mature

enricozb

3 months ago

Is this at all like vanadium? [0]

[0]: vanadium.github.io

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ID: 45727557Type: storyLast synced: 11/20/2025, 5:02:38 PM