⚠️ Community request: Chitchatter needs a TURN server!

[jeremyckahn]

Hi all, it appears that Open Relay, which Chitchatter uses to establish peer connections when P2P access is unavailable, is changing such that Chitchatter may not be able to use it going forward.

Open Relay no longer provides public STUN/TURN server credentials and instructs readers to sign up. I did this, and upon doing so I needed to agree to the operator of Open Relay's Terms of Service. These terms are a nonstarter for Chitchatter, as they would restrict free use of the app.

It appears that the Open Relay credentials in use by Chitchatter are still working (based on my testing with https://icetest.info/), and the project is still in compliance with the Open Relay project's terms and conditions (which is separate from metered.ca's terms). However, I expect this may change at any time and negatively affect Chitchatter's connection reliability.

So, we need to find an alternative solution.

Call to action

I would like to ask the community to donate TURN server resources to Chitchatter. It's easy enough to set Chitchatter up to use different TURN servers (I can take care of that), but actually hosting and running such servers costs money. I can't cover this cost myself, as Chitchatter generates no income. So, I would like to request support from those that can provide such resources to do so.

If you are in a position to financially support truly free speech and private communication, please get in touch with me either in this issue thread or privately via email (my address is at https://github.com/jeremyckahn). I am more than happy to do the development work, but I cannot cover the financial cost.

Please help this project thrive!

[dillfrescott]

Is there the option to somehow avoid using a TURN server entirely? I think the more decentralized chitchatter is, the better of course!

[jeremyckahn]

We can certainly go without TURN servers (and may end up needing to do so if nobody can help with this issue), but then Chitchatter peers will simply fail to connect in some scenarios. In particular, Chitchatter users on mobile and corporate networks will probably be most affected. For home "desktop" use, connections should still generally work in my experience.

This is a fundamental issue with all P2P applications and is not specific to Chitchatter. I think that some non-web apps such as BitTorrent have various ways to mitigate this, but they do not seem to be an option for Chitchatter given that it is a pure web app.

[dillfrescott]

Not sure if this would help at all, but Oracle cloud allows you up to 2 "always free" rather low powered VPS servers with unlimited bandwidth. They would be more than enough to run a coturn server on for free.

[jeremyckahn]

Oracle cloud allows you up to 2 "always free" rather low powered VPS servers with unlimited bandwidth. They would be more than enough to run a coturn server on for free.

That's an interesting idea! I have reservations about using Oracle's platform (I haven't heard great things about them as a company), but this might be a good solution to our problem. I will explore it!

[jeremyckahn]

I spent some time looking into Oracle's free VPS. Even for the free tier, I need to provide credit card info. I don't really feel comfortable with giving Oracle this information, so I'd prefer not to go this route.

If someone else is interested in setting up a free account with Oracle and hosting a Coturn instance for Chitchatter, please let me know!

[ThatsMyCall]

Hi Jeremy,

If personal creditcard details is an issue i think i got a solution. There are multiple Turkish apps the easiest one would be Oldubil is a good one that give out a prepaid creditcard number without the need to fill in personal details or deposit money.
They just need a phone number which can be get anonymously using crypto for example from 5sim.net

If you need help let me know.

[jeremyckahn]

Hi @ThatsMyCall, thanks for the suggestion! I'm US-based, so I'd prefer to stick with US-based solutions such as https://privacy.com/ to avoid any regulatory issues. Regardless, I see your point. I can look into one of these options to see if it would safely enable use of Oracle's VPS. 🙂

[jeremyckahn]

Someone reached out to me privately about contacting the EFF about potentially providing/funding a TURN server for Chitchatter. I think this is a great idea and I will try to do that soon. 🙂

[dbd5]

Hi @jeremyckahn,
Did you have any luck with EFF?
It may be helpful if you could determine the budget and share the information for those that are willing to contribute

[jeremyckahn]

Hi @dbd5, I haven't had much time to focus on this in recent weeks, but I'm hoping to get back to it soon. You raise a great point about determining budgetary needs. That should probably be figured out before we reach out to anyone specifically.

Does anyone here have experience with hosting a TURN server? I never have, so it's hard for me to gauge what it might cost. Chitchatter (intentionally) has no analytics, so I have no idea how many people use it and what the usage looks like in terms of TURN relay bandwidth. Generally speaking, we should probably determine a max bandwidth budget because unbounded usage could result in exorbitant server costs.

[jeremyckahn]

Great news: With 7a4862f we now have a TURN server! Huge thanks to @sini6a for offering to configure and host the server. Now many more people can connect with Chitchatter! 🙌

[jeremyckahn]

Update: The volunteered TURN server that Chitchatter has been using for the last several months is temporarily unavailable. I anticipate that it will become available again in the future, but it's unclear when that may happen. In any case, Chitchatter once again needs a TURN server in order to facilitate reliable P2P connections.

Are any members of the community able to provide a TURN server for Chitchatter in the meantime? If so, please let me know either by responding in this thread or by emailing me (my address can be found on my GitHub profile at @jeremyckahn). Historically, the TURN server has relayed roughly 50-100 GB of bandwidth per month:

Please help support this project and enable reliable P2P connections for all! 🙏

[jeremyckahn]

I've found a free TURN service: https://www.expressturn.com/

And I've configured Chitchatter to use it in ff03190. It seems to be working!

According to expressturn.com, the free tier gets 1000 GB of bandwidth a month and I can pay $9 a month to increase that to 5000GB. This should hopefully get us pretty far, so let's see how it goes!

[dillfrescott]

Wow! that pricing and free allowance blows metered.ca out of the water!

[jeremyckahn]

@dillfrescott yeah! I'm a bit uneasy with a free service that's offering this much. I have a feeling that there must be some sort of drawback that we may discover later. Fortunately WebRTC traffic is E2E encrypted, so I don't think there's any privacy concerns here.

[dillfrescott]

yes, I made my own account on that site and changed my instance's credentials, I also think it is a bit odd that you can't even view the amount of bandwidth used, and you could pretty easily use anything @yourdomain.com as the email and get a ton of free usage (probably not morally right) but I dont recall even an email confirmation...

[dillfrescott]

My best guess is that they are probably tapping into unencrypted connections for data mining. But since chitchatter is encrypted it doesnt matter much

[jeremyckahn]

Yeah it's definitely a little sketchy. We don't have a better option at the moment though. I'd still prefer to use resources offered by someone from the community to avoid any issues with this service, but for now we should be okay! :)

[dillfrescott]

There is always the option of installing coturn on a cheap VPS with unlimited traffic. IONOS offers an unlimited traffic VPS Linux XS VPS with 1 GB of ram and a 10 GB ssd for 2 dollars a month.

I used to use them and they offer decent service.

So thats always an option!

[jeremyckahn]

There is always the option of installing coturn on a cheap VPS with unlimited traffic. IONOS offers an unlimited traffic VPS Linux XS VPS with 1 GB of ram and a 10 GB ssd for 2 dollars a month.

I used to use them and they offer decent service.

So thats always an option!

Technically this seems like a fine approach, but I have two reservations with doing this:

1. I don't want to pay money to provide Chitchatter. I spend a significant amount of my time working on Chitchatter and giving it away for free, and I am happy to do so (even at the opportunity cost to myself). However, I don't feel as comfortable spending money out of my pocket to provide a service that doesn't make me any money in return.
2. More importantly, I don't want to be accountable for any infrastructure that touches user data (even if it's encrypted). In this case, that's just the TURN server. Although it's highly unlikely, it's conceivable that I could be subject to subpoenas or other legal repercussions because of the anonymous nature of Chitchatter. I don't build it to support illegal activity, but the reality is that people likely will use it for that regardless of what I do. Given the retributive nature of American politics and law enforcement, I choose to retain plausible deniability by never having access to anything that touches user data.

Ideally someone from a country other than the one I live in (America) would provide the TURN server to deter any conceivable legal entanglements. I don't think there's any material legal risk in hosting Chitchatter's TURN server, but for my own peace of mind I'd prefer not to be managing that aspect of the project.

[dillfrescott]

Ah that makes sense! I'm from America too and I didn't even think about that!

[jeremyckahn]

It seems that the ExpressTURN server isn't particularly reliable and is frequently unavailable. I'll reopen this issue so that someone can potentially see it and offer a TURN server.

[dillfrescott]

It seems that the ExpressTURN server isn't particularly reliable and is frequently unavailable

I noticed that too a few days ago. It was too good to be true unfortunately.

[jeremyckahn]

I noticed that too a few days ago. It was too good to be true unfortunately.

Yeah... I'm not surprised that ExpressTURN is flaky. 😕

I think finding good TURN server resources is going to be a perpetual cat-and-mouse game for Chitchatter. That's a drawback of a community-driven, noncommercial project like this. But I think that's still better than being beholden to commercial interests!