6 ms·

Why not use IPFS, which is specifically designed for this sort of usage and will be more resilient?

by stirner 10y ago

kinlan 10y ago
I didn't know about it. I chose webtorrent because I potentially also wanted to have content created from the app to be long term on the torrent network if people are seeding the content.
- niftich 10y ago
  There was a discussion about the world's oldest torrent, where others and I mused about solutions to the problem of ephemeral seeds: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10962305 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10962305 I suggested that one could maybe bridge Bittorrent and IPFS, then someone suggested that IPFS would be ideal for being the 'canonical' source of the file while the other protocols (HTTP, BT, WT) are merely ways to access the file.
  - toomuchtodo 10y ago
    > then someone suggested that IPFS would be ideal for being the 'canonical' source of the file while the other protocols (HTTP, BT, WT) are merely ways to access the file. Hey! That was me! I still believe its a great idea ;)
  - greglindahl 10y ago
    The Internet Archive seeds all of our items' torrents since 2012. IPFS is a more straightforward way for us to be sure we've got independent seeds of all of our content. Got 25 petabytes of disk?
    - niftich 10y ago
      Uhhh, 20 GB free... I'm just a third-party, but if you were to get in touch with the IPFS team to host a limited amount of IA content as a proof-of-concept, I'm sure it would be a great publicity for both of your organizations.
      - greglindahl 10y ago
        We're in touch with them, yes, and we have a proof-of-concept node.
    - toomuchtodo 10y ago
      I've always wanted to write a distributed ArchiveTeam torrent server that, instead of distributing crawlers for ingestion, equally distributed IA torrents to distributed end-user storage (in a VM most likely). If seeding for a torrent dropped below a threshold, that torrent would be advertised to other client nodes to download and then serve themselves. Client VMs could come and go, and the announcer would always ensure remote storage was handled in an orderly fashion. Perhaps this year is the year!
kodablah 10y ago
Seems js-ipfs[0] is not quite ready for prime time (though it's close) and the author had a requirement to do everything from a browser. https://github.com/ipfs/js-ipfs/ https://github.com/ipfs/js-ipfs/
- lewisl9029 10y ago
  Unfortunately it looks like WebRTC support and DHT support isn't planned for this current release of js-ipfs according to their roadmap [1], both of which could be a giant leap forward in enabling truly decentralized apps. Bittorrent DHT doesn't actually run in the browser yet either [2], so WebTorrent in the browser currently only has access to the tracker infrastructure, and thus isn't as decentralized as one might think. [1] https://github.com/ipfs/js-ipfs/blob/master/ROADMAP.md https://github.com/ipfs/js-ipfs/blob/master/ROADMAP.md [2] https://github.com/feross/webtorrent/issues/288 https://github.com/feross/webtorrent/issues/288
  - carolc 10y ago
    (IPFS dev here) We've been working hard to get js-ipfs to a working level and just last week announced it's ready. While it's still early days and we have plenty to do to make it even more robust, we have it fully working with WebRTC support as of today. We've developed some apps and demos that essentially enable you to create dynamic content and apps on IPFS, purely in the browser. We do have to currently rely on a centralized Pubsub (in a similar fashion to torrent trackers) but we're working on to provide a decentralized pubsub mechanisms as part of IPFS. Regarding persistency: js-ipfs and the main ipfs (native go-ipfs) networks are not yet connected but we're very close to having that. Once they all communicate in the same network, we can provide a lot better persistency as users don't have to keep the tabs open in the browser. Take a look at some of the examples of what can be done today with js-ipfs, that is fully in the browser: https://github.com/haadcode/orbit https://github.com/haadcode/orbit (specifically https://github.com/haadcode/orbit/tree/js-ipfs https://github.com/haadcode/orbit/tree/js-ipfs) https://github.com/ipfs/paperhub https://github.com/ipfs/paperhub https://github.com/haadcode/orbit-db https://github.com/haadcode/orbit-db https://github.com/haadcode/proto2 https://github.com/haadcode/proto2
  - 10y ago

Why not use IPFS, which is specifically designed for this sort of usage and will be more resilient?

by stirner 10y ago

Why not use IPFS, which is specifically designed for this sort of usage and will be more resilient?

I didn't know about it. I chose webtorrent because I potentially also wanted to have content created from the app to be long term on the torrent network if people are seeding the content.

niftich 10y ago
There was a discussion about the world's oldest torrent, where others and I mused about solutions to the problem of ephemeral seeds: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10962305 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10962305 I suggested that one could maybe bridge Bittorrent and IPFS, then someone suggested that IPFS would be ideal for being the 'canonical' source of the file while the other protocols (HTTP, BT, WT) are merely ways to access the file.
- toomuchtodo 10y ago
  > then someone suggested that IPFS would be ideal for being the 'canonical' source of the file while the other protocols (HTTP, BT, WT) are merely ways to access the file. Hey! That was me! I still believe its a great idea ;)
- greglindahl 10y ago
  The Internet Archive seeds all of our items' torrents since 2012. IPFS is a more straightforward way for us to be sure we've got independent seeds of all of our content. Got 25 petabytes of disk?
  - niftich 10y ago
    Uhhh, 20 GB free... I'm just a third-party, but if you were to get in touch with the IPFS team to host a limited amount of IA content as a proof-of-concept, I'm sure it would be a great publicity for both of your organizations.
    - greglindahl 10y ago
      We're in touch with them, yes, and we have a proof-of-concept node.
  - toomuchtodo 10y ago
    I've always wanted to write a distributed ArchiveTeam torrent server that, instead of distributing crawlers for ingestion, equally distributed IA torrents to distributed end-user storage (in a VM most likely). If seeding for a torrent dropped below a threshold, that torrent would be advertised to other client nodes to download and then serve themselves. Client VMs could come and go, and the announcer would always ensure remote storage was handled in an orderly fashion. Perhaps this year is the year!

kodablah 10y ago

Seems js-ipfs[0] is not quite ready for prime time (though it's close) and the author had a requirement to do everything from a browser. https://github.com/ipfs/js-ipfs/ https://github.com/ipfs/js-ipfs/

lewisl9029 10y ago
Unfortunately it looks like WebRTC support and DHT support isn't planned for this current release of js-ipfs according to their roadmap [1], both of which could be a giant leap forward in enabling truly decentralized apps. Bittorrent DHT doesn't actually run in the browser yet either [2], so WebTorrent in the browser currently only has access to the tracker infrastructure, and thus isn't as decentralized as one might think. [1] https://github.com/ipfs/js-ipfs/blob/master/ROADMAP.md https://github.com/ipfs/js-ipfs/blob/master/ROADMAP.md [2] https://github.com/feross/webtorrent/issues/288 https://github.com/feross/webtorrent/issues/288
- carolc 10y ago
  (IPFS dev here) We've been working hard to get js-ipfs to a working level and just last week announced it's ready. While it's still early days and we have plenty to do to make it even more robust, we have it fully working with WebRTC support as of today. We've developed some apps and demos that essentially enable you to create dynamic content and apps on IPFS, purely in the browser. We do have to currently rely on a centralized Pubsub (in a similar fashion to torrent trackers) but we're working on to provide a decentralized pubsub mechanisms as part of IPFS. Regarding persistency: js-ipfs and the main ipfs (native go-ipfs) networks are not yet connected but we're very close to having that. Once they all communicate in the same network, we can provide a lot better persistency as users don't have to keep the tabs open in the browser. Take a look at some of the examples of what can be done today with js-ipfs, that is fully in the browser: https://github.com/haadcode/orbit https://github.com/haadcode/orbit (specifically https://github.com/haadcode/orbit/tree/js-ipfs https://github.com/haadcode/orbit/tree/js-ipfs) https://github.com/ipfs/paperhub https://github.com/ipfs/paperhub https://github.com/haadcode/orbit-db https://github.com/haadcode/orbit-db https://github.com/haadcode/proto2 https://github.com/haadcode/proto2
- 10y ago