Out of curiosity, what are the motivation(s) for not requiring users to sign in? Is it just lowering the barrier to entry, or are you concerned with privacy?
I’m curious to know how the solution would work.
I’m curious to know how the solution would work.
For the login-gate, I'm pretty sure 99%+ of the visitor would have not created an account. Even without the login, the HN room shared in that thread was kind of inactive.
Since the rooms are "private' by default (secret token in the URL), authentification is now really necessary for casual usage.
This could also work in a peer-to-peer context by only using the server for public key registration (i.e. by chat room). All messages would go directly between clients and the server would never receive chat messages.