And a short update on a rather serious topic…
I was super excited about the change to WebRTC and the possibilities coming with it. But last night I was about to implement the Handshake via Scratchpads … and ran into timeout-issues because when writing the OFFER/ANSWER to a scratchpad it takes a while (I saw multiple successful reads with old state before the new state with OFFER/ANSWER came through) … the WebRTC flow is not made for a communication channel where the 2 messages (OFFER and ANWER) take longer than ~30s to be communicated …
…we’re at up to 2 min per direction from what I saw here … but ofc my crappy home internet and I would expect the speed of autonomi to increase with enhancements being implemented …
Right now I’m doing a bit more digging to investigate which step is allowed to take how long and how I can maybe extend some phases of the process a bit with tricks … but it’s very standardized and I’m afraid there might be a pretty hard maximum time limit for the WebRTC flow.
Since I’m working locally via WiFi and not the best Internet I’ll have a look at speeds when I host dweb on a server.
independently of the outcome of this little research we have a number of possible paths forward…
- if we’re really lucky I’ll just optimize the timing of the executed operations and it works for everyone
- possibly that will not work then we might be in a situation where it works for people with good internet (now) while it doesn’t work for the at least other 50%
- as a temporary workaround I may use the communication scratchpad just for coordinating who creates the offer and who answers + communicating handshake IDs to use a simple server run by me for the handshake.
- midterm we might be back at the companion app solution … because if we don’t use the browsers WebRTC functionality we aren’t limited by it’s timeouts …
… if someone happens to know how to expand the Handshake-Process for a WebRTC handshake for using a data channel that might take 2 minutes per communication direction please feel free to mention it here 
I really like the WebRTC approach and I would like to believe that autonomi performance increase should make it all work soonish … but if it doesn’t this communication most certainly shouldn’t rely an a server run by me … so I think the companion app looks more likely again midterm than I expected/hoped …
I’ll report back when I know more about this issue / have a clear plan in this matter.