Blind Peering: putting the "server" in serverless 🔒

Keet is serverless — there's no company server sitting in the middle, storing your chats. So a fair question is: if I send a message and the other person is offline, where does it go?

The answer is blind peering, and it's how Keet quietly puts the "server" back in serverless. Some peer still does the one job a server used to do — stay online and hold your message until the other person is back — except no company owns it and it can never read what it's holding.

The problem, in one sentence

For a message to arrive, someone has to be online to pass it along. But the person you're messaging is offline — and a moment later, you might go offline too. So who holds the message in the meantime?

The simple version

Think of your message as a sealed envelope, written in a code only the person you're messaging can read.

To reach your friend, that envelope gets passed to other people already connected to the network — think of them as couriers. A courier will happily hold onto the envelope while your friend is away and keep passing it along until it arrives. Because the envelope is sealed and coded, no courier can read what's inside — they only know to carry it and hand it on.

In Keet, those couriers are blind peers (sometimes called blind relays). They're just other computers on the network that agree to hold your message and pass it along.

Why is it called "blind"?

Because the helper is blind to what's inside.

Your message is end-to-end encrypted before it ever leaves your device. The blind peer only ever sees a scrambled, locked blob of data. It knows "hold this and forward it," but it can never read your message, your name, or who it's for in a way it can understand.

Putting it together

So when you message someone who's offline — and then go offline yourself before they're back — here's what happens:

1. You wrote a message. It was encrypted on your device.
2. Because your friend was offline, the encrypted message was held by one or more blind peers on the network.
3. You went offline — but that's fine, because you were no longer the only one holding it.
4. When your friend reconnected, they synced the encrypted message from a blind peer and their device unlocked it.

Those four steps look like this end to end:

So the message was stored somewhere — but only ever as locked, unreadable data on other peers, never as readable text on a company server. 🔐

Want the deep technical version?

This page is the friendly summary. Under the hood, blind peering is really about data availability on Keet's peer-to-peer stack (Hypercore and Hyperswarm): a blind peer is a dedicated replicator that stores and serves your encrypted data without ever decrypting it — giving you server-like availability without a server.

For the full technical explanation, see Availability and blind peering 🍐 in the Pear documentation.