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There is _one_ thing that can allow "two machines in the same room to talk to each other without sending a request to a server farm in Virginia". It does require the _first_ request to populate the app: Web Bluetooth. Unfortunately it's only implemented in Chrome,but it does work.

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P2P in browser was improved a lot in the past years. Your two machines could now connect via WebRTC and then send data to each other directly, no need for bluetooth. This works great and has a low latency. With rxdb you could even realtime-sync the whole application state [1] without connection to a server farm in virginia.

[1] https://rxdb.info/replication-p2p.html

We tried Web Bluetooth in a project. It was extremely flaky. Notably it also only works as a server, so you cant peer two browsers over it either.

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