Reached 20 users on Phantom, my serverless P2P discord-alternative! The Phantom family is growing so, join the digital sovreignty ride!
Soooo, I built Phantom because I was bothered that even "private" messengers route everything through a central server you have to trust. I wanted to see if a chat app could work with no server at all, so I fired up my pc, and began researching some tech stack to actually help me make it come to life.
Fast forward 3 months, Phantom is ready to be shipped, and how it works (technical side lol): peers announce a room topic to the public Hyperswarm DHT, find each other, and connect directly. The DHT only helps with discovery and it never sees message content. Once connected, it's end-to-end encrypted (X25519 key exchange, XSalsa20-Poly1305), with voice over WebRTC. History is stored locally in SQLite. There's no central database, no account, no telemetry, and no server I run.
The hardest part by far was NAT traversal but Hyperswarm's UDP holepunching handles the common NAT types; symmetric NAT and CGNAT are the genuine weak spot of any pure-P2P design, mine included, and falling back gracefully there was most of the pain. Voice over those direct connections nearly broke me. (around...20 tests...)
It's a free desktop app (Windows now, more coming), download and run it, no signup and no account. Pay-what-you-want if you'd like to support it, but it's fully functional free. I'm the only person on this and I'm here to answer anything.
Link here: https://crtnoise.github.io/Phantom-Land/