While it doesn't solve all the issues that come up through the current segmentation, it is very much possible today to assemble components that let you forget about segmentation while you use it. And it is designed from the ground up, to use existing internet technologies, while avoiding the lock in and dependencies on browser vendors or other large players.

I would say it is an excellent building block for application developers to route around the segmentation. There are several projects that work well in restricted enviroments that use iroh for some features. E.g. https://delta.chat/en/

E.g. you could write an excellent encrypted chat app using iroh, the Tor or Nym custom transport, and BLE or direct wifi for local connections.

You have to be careful though to make sure you configure the transports correctly in order not to expose data you don't want exposed. Iroh can be used in highly restricted environments, but the defaults favour performance over complete metadata privacy.

I'd also like for it to prepare tea

Jasmine tea and a game of Pai Sho.

the zen life advice will come if you use it long enough :)

Hi, I also work on iroh.

Iroh is built for environments where connectivity is unreliable or intermittent, so it can be a good fit for use cases involving connection failures, offline periods, or semi-connected devices.

We provide a range of peer-to-peer protocols that don't require a central server, including key-value stores, blob transfer, collaborative documents, and streaming audio/video. These protocols are designed to synchronize devices back to a consistent state, even after long disconnections or network interruptions.

If you'd like to explore whether iroh could work for your use case, we're happy to chat. Feel free to email us at support@iroh.computer, and we can set up a call.

We think a library is more useful for widespread adoption. I can't get my mother to install a daemon, but I can get her to download an app that uses iroh under the hood.

Besides, as a lot of people have mentioned already, if you want a dedicated server there are a lot of existing options.

We did write a few small dedicated applications to show off iroh, sendme https://www.iroh.computer/sendme and dumbpipe https://www.dumbpipe.dev/ .

A key distinguishing factor is that iroh is meant to be used as a library that you can embed into your desktop, mobile or embedded apps.

Up to now our users are mostly teams that have a rust or C/C++ core, such as https://delta.chat/ . But now that we have bindings teams who use other languages should be able to use iroh.

So you can write e.g. an android and ios app that uses iroh direct connections under the hood, and the app user does not have to know or care about this at all.

We keep thinking about ways to combine iroh + zeroMQ! I think these two could compose. (Not familiar with nanomsg myself)

About tailscale: It's similar, but iroh is not a VPN, so it doesn't add a TUN interface. Instead, you'd build iroh directly into your application. Using iroh you can build a VPN, and there are projects that do so (iroh-lan/iroh-vpn are some hobbyist projects). The upside of building it into your application is that it doesn't need special permissions and is easy to ship to the user.