// the find
tom-james-watson/p2p.chat
p2p video conferencing powered by WebRTC.
p2p.chat is a WebRTC video conferencing app with a mesh architecture — peers connect directly, a lightweight signalling server handles discovery, and there's no media relay unless WebRTC falls back to TURN. The author has archived it as of late 2023 due to lack of bandwidth to maintain it.
The mesh architecture is the right call for a privacy-focused tool — no media passes through a server, which is a real design choice rather than a marketing claim. The codebase is well-structured: signalling server is isolated, state is managed with atoms (likely Jotai), and the room components are broken into focused single-responsibility files. WebRTC E2E encryption is on by default since it's baked into the protocol — no configuration needed. Self-hostable signalling server means you can run this entirely on infrastructure you control.
Archived and unmaintained since late 2023 — the README says this explicitly, so adopting it means owning the maintenance burden immediately. Mesh topology doesn't scale beyond 4–5 participants before bandwidth on each peer becomes the bottleneck; there's no SFU fallback. No TURN server configuration is visible in the repo, which means calls across strict NATs or corporate firewalls will silently fail. The lib/ package appears to be a half-extracted shared types layer with just one file — doesn't look like it was ever finished.