greenavocado 5 days ago

The only way this will be possible is if there is widespread adoption of an Internet overlay network similar to Tailscale in its design. Fortunately or unfortunately depending on how you look at it Tailscale is limited to Layer 3 so Multicast doesn't work (it depends on IGMP to function correctly).

2
globular-toast 5 days ago

Why Tailscale? Are you aware of IPv6?

jeroenhd 5 days ago

AFAIK IPv6 multicast across the internet is pretty much dead. ISPs seem to block it because of its DDoS potential. They use it themselves of course (very useful for streaming live TV across their private VLANs) but as an outsider you'll have to convince every ISP and backbone provider to trust your multicast stream, which they probably won't.

Tailscale (or any other P2P overlay network) could solve this problem by re-enabling the multicast support that most ISPs block. It's not a terrible idea.

Edit: a comment elsewhere linked https://www.librecast.net/librecast.html which seems to be doing exactly this.

greenavocado 4 days ago

Transit and peering agreements between ISPs typically exclude multicast, meaning packets are dropped at network boundaries.

Tepix 5 days ago

Why do you think so?