I have been on this exact same quest and train of thought recently. I agree with almost everything you say about current UI elements sticking around. However, I do strongly feel that UI may be on the brink of a new revolution and we just don't know how it's gonna look and who's working on it.

Xerox Alto was the first GUI ever (ironically I chatgpted that in a text based interaction :D) and the leap from text to GUI was really not that obvious either I would think. I think we're in the text based computer era now and can't just know exactly where we will be in the next few years.

Now here's my crazy idea that will likely put me in a mental category: I think the ultimate "UI" will be intuition. It's not that I ask an AI to do something or fetch whatever I want. It's the act of just having constant access to all information and action subconsciously. Now for that you'd have to wait until Elon plants a chip in everyone or someone comes up with a less dystopian device :D

If you ever get to more clear answers to your questions please do share. Like I said I am very curious about this topic.

You do have a valid point that TURN is sometimes needed but not ALWAYS right?

My understanding is that ICE tries to establish a direct p2p connection between clients and only if there is no path, it uses TURN?

In either case, the files definitely don't go through my servers and are not stored anywhere and are e2e encrypted which really matters the most.

Right, many people can connect directly, but also many cannot.

And because a large number of people do need TURN (always), coupled with the majority of WebRTC apps not properly supporting TURN (giving no way to set your own details, or provide a free one, of which there really aren't any reliable public ones)... I've basically never seen it work.

No p2p WebRTC app I have ever tried with a friend has worked.

You make a good point there but all those solutions you mentioned store your file one way or another. Which also means your file is getting uploaded to some random server and you pretty much have no control over what happens after. With Berb that simply is not the case. WebRTC is a tool to achieve what I want and not the main selling point. It is simple - I don't want my files to be uploaded and I want the transfer to be instant (no download link later).

Beside the fact that this JUST got launched and can either be liked and used by many, or another dead product in a year, I have found myself using it multiple times so far. Like sending a large file to/from my work computer etc. If this is solving a problem for even a small number of people, that is great!

Wormhole.app and Magic Wormhole/Wormhole-William are all end to end encrypted by the client.

Thx for the analysis! copyToClipboard is for copying the session link so it can be opened on your other device.

As for analytics, you are exactly right. I need to know if people are using the app the way it was intended and soon need to add more events for errors. Though perhaps it is something I can maintain on a separate repo? idk, the goal for me was to truly make everything on berb.app open source. no hiding anything

Thx for the suggestion. Just added a license but don't really have a good contributing guideline yet. Would love to discuss any feature requests/bugs if you open an issue.

This looks cool. However my goal with Berb is pretty much browser to browser only. Although if people keep asking for other features, I might consider a desktop/mobile app.

Yes, that's pretty much the only thing the server does. And maintain an in-memory state of connections. Room for improvement for sure.

Oh I would love some more details if you think that's the case. With Berb only two clients can connect really. So let's say you somehow guess a peer ID, which is very tough, and connect to a random user. You can technically send a file but they can easily ignore it since they didn't initiate the transfer. That being said, I can definitely add a way to verify the file is legit like the suggestion in the reply with hashes.

Should users trust the signaling server? IIRC, the signaling server can easily intervene SDP offer/answer so that it can intercept user files or instruct users to send files wherever it wants.

Oh I see what you are saying. Yeah I guess if we didn't know what the signalling server was doing, that would be a valid argument. But in my case we can see the server code is pure and simple. Unless you mean there's a bug that allows an attacker to do that?

Either way, would love to know your thoughts on improving trust with this.

This looks very interesting. I will def take a look. thx

We use webrtc which by default is encrypted. nothing passes through our server. In fact the only thing our server does is signalling. everything else is P2P.