In this Techlore Talks interview, I sat down with Mathias Buus Madsen (CEO of Holepunch) to break down peer-to-peer (P2P) in plain English: apps where there are no servers—just devices talking directly to each other. We dug into why that matters for regular people, especially when “free” apps usually hide the real cost in the background: infrastructure bills, incentives to monetize you, and the surveillance-advertising pipeline. With P2P, the network scales naturally because everyone contributes a little capacity, which is why systems like BitTorrent could handle tens of millions of nodes without a traditional server stack. We also talked about the messy reputation P2P gets from piracy-era BitTorrent, and why that’s more about how people used the tech than what the tech is. One of the biggest takeaways: you can’t realistically “shut down” a true P2P network—it becomes a whack-a-mole problem at scale—so censorship efforts often target centralized choke points like DNS or indexing sites instead. Finally, we pivoted into what Holepunch is building today, especially Keet: a serverless messenger designed for private, resilient communication, where the goal is for it to feel like a normal app while removing the hidden infrastructure and control points that usually come with centralized platforms.