Oh, wow. I didn't expect to see this on HN today. This was a toy app I wrote to learn a bit more about Elixir, Phoenix, and Phoenix's concept "channels" (websockets). I submitted it a long time ago to HN.
I wrote a bit more about it on my blog: http://gabe.durazo.us/tech/ephemeral-p2p-project/ (wow, I need to update my blog). Unfortunately, it's not really that p2p, contrary to the name. There's a server running on heroku that manages all the websocket connections and matching. What is p2p is the page content, which lives in the browser, and which gets piped around.
I get my little $7 bill from heroku every month and wonder "is this the time I should finally spend an hour and shut it all down?" But then every once in a while I dig up the old HN submission and follow the link and I see a "Currently Viewing" count of 2 or 3 and I wonder who or what it is and why. If it ever drops to 0 then it wouldn't really be recoverable and I'd shut it down.
Thank you for footing that bill for so long, this has been a little joy for me for a long time, just seeing how long it can last. Would love to buy you a beer someday.
> I wonder who or what it is and why.
Some people really want this to live forever. Or they're just that bad about closing old tabs. Both options are fun to think about.
Thanks for keeping this going!
Great work! Also there are alternatives to Heroku that don't cost money now that they killed the free hobby tier. I've used Vercel and Cyclic and both are great among others.
I wonder: did you consider adding size to the end of the hash?
In a future where all content could be addressed by hash there will be collisions, but adding the expected size moves it from “possibly given enough files” to “extremely unlikely assuming there’s no flaw in the hashing algo”