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> Beaker does not currently support IPFS, even though it used to in the beginning. We're hopeful Beaker might support IPFS once again in the future, but for now

> Beaker does not currently support IPFS, even though it used to in the beginning. We're hopeful Beaker might support IPFS once again in the future, but for now, Beaker just supports Dat. Since you're a developer at protocol labs, I will assume you remember why beaker dropped IPFS in favor of DAT. I think IPFS is cool but the biggest hurdle for adoption is the naming scheme. More specifically what happens when a file content changes. You have IPNS to handle this but as far as I know it's virtually unusable because it's extremely slow. And I got the impression that you guys have no real solution for this, and maybe IPNS is not even one of your top priorities because you're focused on other important things. But as a user this matters a lot because without a name resolution system, we're left with static files only, and while this may be a good alternative to S3, this means that's about it and people can't build apps on top of it. I wonder what your plans are and if you have any solution to building an actual functional IPNS, or if you're focused on building an S3 alternative at the moment.

diggan 9y ago
Indeed, I do remember why Beaker dropped IPFS support. Basically, it comes down to the URL structure and how we structure them in the IPFS ecosystem, which is not super easy to integrate with browsers today. There is some logs about the discussion over at Github: https://github.com/beakerbrowser/beaker/issues/2 https://github.com/beakerbrowser/beaker/issues/2 There is a open feature request for (re)adding IPFS support to Beaker as well, if someone feels a bit experimental with adding IPFS support to a Electron application: https://github.com/beakerbrowser/beaker/issues/480 https://github.com/beakerbrowser/beaker/issues/480 Reach out to me if you feel interested in helping out and I can point you in the right direction. Email is in my profile. Re: IPNS is currently slow: Yes, it is. Apologies for that, it definitely has to get faster to be really useful. The network has grown a lot and we are working on improving the performance of IPNS, both for adding the records and reading them. Currently the adding of records is slower than reading, as reading now uses pubsub to push updates and making it a lot faster than before. We do have more solutions in mind for IPNS performance and still doing research on the best way of implementing them. If you haven't seen IPFS pubsub before, I urge you to take a look, as it gives you the ability of doing communication with a large number of nodes cheaply. So while IPFS started out as a distributed file system with naming on top, we now have more functionality for handling dynamic data and working on making it even easier to build applications with just IPFS.

diggan 9y ago

Indeed, I do remember why Beaker dropped IPFS support. Basically, it comes down to the URL structure and how we structure them in the IPFS ecosystem, which is not super easy to integrate with browsers today. There is some logs about the discussion over at Github: https://github.com/beakerbrowser/beaker/issues/2 https://github.com/beakerbrowser/beaker/issues/2 There is a open feature request for (re)adding IPFS support to Beaker as well, if someone feels a bit experimental with adding IPFS support to a Electron application: https://github.com/beakerbrowser/beaker/issues/480 https://github.com/beakerbrowser/beaker/issues/480 Reach out to me if you feel interested in helping out and I can point you in the right direction. Email is in my profile. Re: IPNS is currently slow: Yes, it is. Apologies for that, it definitely has to get faster to be really useful. The network has grown a lot and we are working on improving the performance of IPNS, both for adding the records and reading them. Currently the adding of records is slower than reading, as reading now uses pubsub to push updates and making it a lot faster than before. We do have more solutions in mind for IPNS performance and still doing research on the best way of implementing them. If you haven't seen IPFS pubsub before, I urge you to take a look, as it gives you the ability of doing communication with a large number of nodes cheaply. So while IPFS started out as a distributed file system with naming on top, we now have more functionality for handling dynamic data and working on making it even easier to build applications with just IPFS.