Great questions! For (1) I'm not sure. I'm primarily a backend dev, so this was partly an experiment for me to play with the front end, too. I kind of hope jav

Great questions! For (1) I'm not sure. I'm primarily a backend dev, so this was partly an experiment for me to play with the front end, too. I kind of hope javascript is not able to connect "sideways" to other ordinary browsers. I would think they'd need to be running some sort of server, which I don't think the browser can get going. Would be happy to learn more about this from someone more knowledgeable. Regarding (2), you should have seen my first approach: Every new client broadcasted a request for the content, and everyone with it responded! Now that was a waste of bandwidth. But what I've done here is I send the request for content out to everyone with it, with a probability of 1/N, where N is roughly the number of people with it. So in your case, it looks like it got sent to two folks. Sometimes it gets sent to none, in which case the client will retry in 2 seconds. It was a little tricky to figure out since phoenix runs every socket connection in its own erlang process (great for robustness and concurrency, but a real mind bender if you're not used to it). So this probabilistic approach was the best I could come up with, instead of having some master process select the right person to send the request to.