Swarm peers not discovering peers like go-ipfs

[warlockdn]

Hi,

I had run both js-ipfs and go-ipfs.

Go-IPFS is very fast in discovering peers and reaches up to 2000 in 5-10 minutes which is real good. Running swarm peers updates the list all the time.

But js-ipfs isn't able to discover any external peers even if I am trying to run swarm peers.

Please advise as to what I am doing wrong here.

Also a weird issue is that I am not able to open the WebUI portal as well. But works fine with go-ipfs.

Please advise.

[alanshaw]

The short answer is that tight now, JS IPFS doesn't have access to the DHT so it can't discover peers like Go IPFS. Additionally, in the browser a JS IPFS node is even more restricted due to same origin policy so in order to discover/connect to peers we have to make use of rendezvous and relay servers, delegated peer/content routing and preload servers for content discoverability.

I've opened an issue to get some proper documentation written to explain the current state of things, the different concepts i've just mentioned and the reasons behind needing to use them.

If you're interested in testing out the DHT you can turn it on by configuring libp2p.

You can also try WebRTC transport and discovery you can turn on as well as websocket-star rendezvous/relay.