On yesterday’s call Gene Hoffman did confirm there would be a better way of connecting the nodes in the near-ish future:
Starts here in the video:
And the transcript here:
28:54 for those who are wondering uh we
28:56 currently use an inferior
28:58 way to get you new nodes that we’re
29:00 planning to replace
29:01 uh florin is actually working on that uh
29:03 as we speak and we’re running it beta
29:04 in-house
29:05 we’re basically going to implement the
29:06 same method that bitcoin uses to get you
29:08 an initial set of nodes but
29:10 for right now we have to scale it up to
29:12 be able to try to get you guys a chance
29:13 to
29:13 start syncing the internet continues to
29:16 be plagued by the switch to ipv6 not
29:19 actually happening
So for now it’s a bit painful to try and get your node to sync, but there’s introducers that should help, yesterday was peak activity on the network due to the launch of transactions but it seems to have settled down, so not a huge need for opening up 8444 at the moment if you can’t.