10 ms·

Putting This Blog on IPFS

304 points by leolambda 8y ago

RcouF1uZ4gsC 8y ago
I was able to load the blog, but the latency was pretty high. That might be one of the downsides of ipfs vs something like Medium.
- leolambda 8y ago
  Two things about this. First, the blog is also available at https://leotindall.com/ https://leotindall.com/ where it is just a regular website. I think it's _really_ interesting that the first thing that comes to mind is Medium and not, you know... a regular website. Second, public IPFS gateways aren't the intended way to use the network. It's meant to be built into browser software, so each user acts as a mirror of what they're currently reading. Latency is high because the gateway is run by a nonprofit and they don't pay for ultrafast hardware for the public gateway.
  - jonas21 8y ago
    > Latency is high because the gateway is run by a nonprofit and they don't pay for ultrafast hardware for the public gateway. Isn't ipfs.io run by Protocol Labs? And didn't they raise something like $250M from the Filecoin ICO? Surely they can afford some fast gateway servers.
  - dookahku 8y ago
    Love what you've done with IPFS and this blog! There are a couple of advantages to places like Medium, Facebook, or Quora over a normal website. The first is branding -- you get what you expect from a site. FB for personal connections (memes or distraction for others), curated content for Medium & Quora, etc. I remember using the web back in the 90s or so. I had committed to memory a dozen sites or so that I would visit every day. Slashdot, Yahoo News, ScaryGoRound etc. It was a bit stressful. Now I can just go to Reddit and just get distracted by whatever. Even curating your own Reddit experience is difficult, like it was for RSS. Most viewers of Reddit don't really create an account. The second is ease of use for publishers. I'm not going to set up a website, even a Wordpress blog now if I can just go post content on Reddit or Medium where I have a chance of people reading it. There are other things like consistent UX, etc.
    - heinrich5991 8y ago
      For Medium, I get what I expect: Some annoying "we've seen you here before" banner covering up the whole page. That usually doesn't happen for personal web pages.
- homeaway2 8y ago
  I don't understand why serving text content -- even a million times -- is so resource intensive that it has to be done on a hosted platform in 2018.
  - anderspitman 8y ago
    Have you heard of Beaker/dat? https://beakerbrowser.com/ https://beakerbrowser.com/
    - mantis07 8y ago
      Yup checked it out. i found one more great app at https://blokada.win/android/ https://blokada.win/android/
      - fwip 8y ago
        How is an ad-blocker for android related to the discussion?
  - heinrichhartman 8y ago
    What's the alternative? Self-hosting? Don't get me started on this. IMO hosting platforms are the only sane choice for blogs in 2018 and the foreseeable future. Also cost is a factor. Hosted solutions are essentially free (in particular GitHub Pages). A dedicated EC2 machine costs 5$/month upwards.
geoah 8y ago
I couldn't get it to load from the ipfs.io gateway, nor my local ipfs daemon, but I could through cloudeflare's ipfs gateway. https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipns/Qme48wyZ7LaF9gC5693DZyJBtehgaFhaKycESroemD5fNX/post/putting_this_blog_on_ipfs/ https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipns/Qme48wyZ7LaF9gC5693DZyJBteh...
- leolambda 8y ago
  That's the beauty of content-addressable networks! :) It's also available at regular-old https://leotindall.com/ https://leotindall.com/
  - Groxx 8y ago
    And at their IPFS gateway: https://ipfs.leotindall.com/ipns/Qme48wyZ7LaF9gC5693DZyJBtehgaFhaKycESroemD5fNX/ https://ipfs.leotindall.com/ipns/Qme48wyZ7LaF9gC5693DZyJBteh... (not that that's functionally much different than the regular page, of course)
  - sobani 8y ago
    Isn't this a failure of IPFS that you can't reliably get to the content even though you know it's address?
    - wink 8y ago
      Yeah, that's what I'd like to know. Being a total noob I enjoyed the article (thanks OP) then went on to wonder how this works. So first I thought it was available through all of these gateways, but then I read something about pinning - do the gateways pin the content? Or the "hosting nodes" (forgive my lack of knowledge about the terminology)?
neospice 8y ago
I was wondering about how to get NGINX to play with IPFS. Now I have a better idea. Thanks for sharing!
pervycreeper 8y ago
Could you explain why you think that Cloudflare's recent effort constitutes an attack on IPFS? That is, wouldn't the pinning of a large number of files, hosted on a fast CDN, be a good thing?
- mcjiggerlog 8y ago
  Ironically the only place that I can load the article is via https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipns/Qme48wyZ7LaF9gC5693DZyJBtehgaFhaKycESroemD5fNX/post/putting_this_blog_on_ipfs/ https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipns/Qme48wyZ7LaF9gC5693DZyJBteh...
  - stcredzero 8y ago
    Is that why this link was posted?
- leolambda 8y ago
  Cloudflare's business model is intrinsically threatened by the existence of a global, distributed, and (basically) commons-supported CDN, because that would make their point-served, centralized, relatively expensive CDN obsolete.
  - pervycreeper 8y ago
    You're implying that there's some ulterior-motive Embrace, Extend, Extinguish plan underlying this? Is there anything, however, in what they announced they will do that will have a negative effect, though?
  - jazzyjackson 8y ago
    Agreed, and yet, isn't the point of the decentralized web that it will still be there when Cloudflare decides to drop the service?
  - pshc 8y ago
    I think Cloudflare could easily co-exist, selling premium IPFS hosting for companies who want highly available and performant content. Not to mention they do much more than static CDN.
keyle 8y ago
Cool explanation. I found Cloudflare's explanation really well put. https://blog.cloudflare.com/distributed-web-gateway/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/distributed-web-gateway/ Since hosting a ipfs node feels like being an onion endpoint, can you restrict bandwidth? Also can you control the size of your local cache or how does it work with the replicated content?
- leolambda 8y ago
  Yes, and yes! There's a cache plus the concept of "pinning". Hosting a node is not quite like being an onion endpoint, because the bandwidth load gets shared out very quickly. Hosting a _gateway_ is a big bandwidth commitment, but I pay for lots of bandwidth for just that reason.
  - keyle 8y ago
    If we compare hash content with http urls, urls are easy to remember, while hash are hard to remember? It feels like the dark ages before altavista, and you had to know the url. Still, a url was more memorable to pass friends by email, than a hash. Will there be ipfs search engines and wouldn't that just be bittorrent? Also browsers remember urls... If everything goes through your local gateway, it's all just /hash, hard to remember / re-discover? Or is the plan also to move away from browsers?
    - TUSF 8y ago
      Here's something of a search engine for IPFS: https://ipfs-search.com/ https://ipfs-search.com/ It works by crawling the DHT, though I don't think it's quite perfect yet. As for URLs vs Hashes, you point URLs to a hash through DNS TXT records.
    - MrEldritch 8y ago
      DNS works just fine for IPNS content-hash-addresses too, and heck, you can do that right now. You just use that, the same way you'd use anything else - just say that dweb.foo.xyz is associated with a particular IPNS address (and www.foo.xyz can be the regular ol' web address).
MrEldritch 8y ago
"Even if my server goes down, as long as these files are pinned somewhere, anyone should be able to use that IPNS name at another gateway and see the blog." This is also, in my opinion, the biggest objection to IPFS - that it really doesn't necessarily lead to any kind of true decentralized hosting unless someone else has decided to pin your files. And why would they? I understand that IPFS is supposed to prioritize connections based on seed/leach ratio like a typical torrent service, but I only torrent a few files at any given time and it's pretty trivial to set them to seed or disable manually; there's no way I'm going to make seed vs. don't seed decisions on every website I visit. So unless for some reason I specifically think to help share some webpage or other, it'll just get auto-deleted from my machine when it cycles out of the cache, as the automated stuff is what'll be keeping track of maintaining my seed/leech ratio, total disk usage for other people's content, upload limits, not leaving if you're one of the only seeders left, etc. In theory, IPFS could be even more prone to link-rot than the vanilla Web, depending on how many people try and actually depend on the decentralized hosting and end up having their files vanish once it's been a long enough time that nobody's still hosting them. And when there's so many different webpages, as opposed to just a few torrents, why would I think to pin any one thing in particular? Torrents can work based on charity and the need to maintain a particular seed/leech ratio; but I don't have the mental energy to bother deciding whether to be charitable about every dang website I visit. So this ends up meaning that IPFS works for popular, recent content, where there's enough people who have downloaded the content themselves recently enough that it's still in their cache to meaningfully take the load off the original host in serving that content. But you're not going to get dedicated long-term seeders of any particular site the way you do with highly-desirable files like pirate torrents. But generically, you will always need your own centralized server for any content you want to upload and make sure stays online long-term. As I understand it, this is sort of the problem Filecoin is trying to solve, but that has its own issues (it's hard to see how paying people to host your stuff on their own machines can ever be cost-competitive with paying AWS to do it).
- MrEldritch 8y ago
  Basically - why would anyone else have your files pinned somewhere?
stcredzero 8y ago
It’s a great technology, and of course that means that Cloudflare wants to run a monkey-in-the-middle attack on it. If you're publishing a service or a piece of software, and absolutely everyone is happy with it, you're doing something wrong.
johntash 8y ago
Is there any way to get a metric of how much something has been downloaded on ipfs? I'm guessing you would have to use google analytics or something?
- tylersmith 8y ago
  Correct. You can't see how many downloads a particular file has without some sort of outside observer.
- TUSF 8y ago
  I assume you mean metrics for how much something has been downloaded from a node you own, right? If so, you can monitor "ipfs log tail" for which blocks have been downloaded and by whom. You can also monitor how much content a specific peer has asked from you and such.
NelsonMinar 8y ago
Qme48wyZ7LaF9gC5693DZyJBtehgaFhaKycESroemD5fNX is a catchy thing to put in an URL.
- leolambda 8y ago
  As I say in my general post on the topic, IPNS is not meant for human use - DNS can be adapted to point to IPNS names just as easily as to point to IP addresses.
MentallyRetired 8y ago
I love the idea, but this needs to be MUCH simpler. If you're aiming for mainstream adoption, especially. I'm a developer and I don't want to go through the hassle of setting any of this up. I believe in the cause but damn I don't have time to become an expert in this tech. Any chance of a simple executable or installer/gui at some point?
frio 8y ago
There's been a few things cropping up in this space recently. On the topic of "indicating that this might be an outdated version", I've not managed to figure out a better solution than either linking to an IPNS index of document versions (so, for humans, some text that says "this might be out of date; check [here]), or running an IPFS node in JS on the browser and then querying for a later revision. I guess I'm looking forward to when browsers integrate with Dat, IPFS etc. natively (Beaker and Firefox are already heading down this path), so that I can rely on a little bit of Javascript that queries `window.IPFS` or some such, instead of having to send something much more heavyweight to the client. In the meantime, if anyone has any better ideas for solving that problem (rel=canonical to an IPNS entry? browser extensions?), I'm all ears :).
- lgierth 8y ago
  The ipfs-companion extension provides `window.IPFS` in Firefox, Chrome, and others :)
  - frio 8y ago
    Yeah, that might be the only way to handle this reasonably in the short-term -- `if (window.IPFS) { fetch(revisionListFromAnIPNS).then(renderIt) }`... but my concern is that if the standard changes in the future and IPFS gets integrated into browsers/becomes `navigator.IPFS`/etc. -- then all those old, immutable pages are permanently going to check the wrong thing. Still, I guess that's a graceful degradation, because for people who don't have the extension today, they'd see the same behaviour. Perhaps it's best to provide a link to a revision list as the default behaviour, with the window.IPFS test as a mildly nicer progressive enhancement. Cheers :).
mantis07 8y ago
As I understand it, this is sort of the problem Filecoin is trying to solve, but that has its own issues (it's hard to see how paying people to host your stuff on their own machines can ever be cost-competitive with paying AWS to do it). http://newpipe.xyz http://newpipe.xyz
- Nursie 8y ago
  It can't - the moment that it becomes at all profitable to run an IPFS node, AWS and their competitors could undercut and effectively capture the market. Their costs are just lower, and will continue to be lower.
heinrichhartman 8y ago
Loading this page took a good 62 seconds to complete. That's 62seconds for a 78.7kb payload. (https://ibb.co/gqoUWe https://ibb.co/gqoUWe). At least at the present point, this is not a viable option for serving web-pages. What I do like about IPFS is that you get links to CONTENT as opposed to LOCATIONS. This is completely independent of the hosting aspects. It would be interesting to offer content links to blog posts. I provide at least a link to the GitHub version history at the bottom of my blog posts (e.g. http://heinrichhartmann.com/blog/Latency-SLOs.html http://heinrichhartmann.com/blog/Latency-SLOs.html). Not ideal but at least it gives you some idea what people might have seen at earlier point in time. In general, I see (at least) two different use cases for links: (1) Pointers: "If you want to learn more about this, check out this website" (2) Citations: "This website claims that there were 20 people at this event." For Pointers you want to have the latest version of the content served at high speed. For Citations you want content links, so you can be sure your readers see what you have seen, and don't care about retrieval performance that much. So there might be a case for Citation Links being hosted on IPFS. Services like archive.org / archive.is might consider integrating with IPFS, though I am not exactly sure how that would look like.
- DailyHN 8y ago
  Loaded in 1-2 seconds for me.
xte 8y ago
May I ask why IPFS instead of ZeroNet that's explicitly build to be a P2P distributed website platform and it's far more simple, lighter and clear than IPFS?
woodandsteel 8y ago
People point out that getting your data stored on ipfs is not guaranteed unless you pay for it. But there is a huge amount of unused storage space out there on people hd's. That means that once the market gets going, storage is going to be really cheap.

304 points by leolambda 8y ago

I was able to load the blog, but the latency was pretty high. That might be one of the downsides of ipfs vs something like Medium.

leolambda 8y ago
Two things about this. First, the blog is also available at https://leotindall.com/ https://leotindall.com/ where it is just a regular website. I think it's _really_ interesting that the first thing that comes to mind is Medium and not, you know... a regular website. Second, public IPFS gateways aren't the intended way to use the network. It's meant to be built into browser software, so each user acts as a mirror of what they're currently reading. Latency is high because the gateway is run by a nonprofit and they don't pay for ultrafast hardware for the public gateway.
- jonas21 8y ago
  > Latency is high because the gateway is run by a nonprofit and they don't pay for ultrafast hardware for the public gateway. Isn't ipfs.io run by Protocol Labs? And didn't they raise something like $250M from the Filecoin ICO? Surely they can afford some fast gateway servers.
- dookahku 8y ago
  Love what you've done with IPFS and this blog! There are a couple of advantages to places like Medium, Facebook, or Quora over a normal website. The first is branding -- you get what you expect from a site. FB for personal connections (memes or distraction for others), curated content for Medium & Quora, etc. I remember using the web back in the 90s or so. I had committed to memory a dozen sites or so that I would visit every day. Slashdot, Yahoo News, ScaryGoRound etc. It was a bit stressful. Now I can just go to Reddit and just get distracted by whatever. Even curating your own Reddit experience is difficult, like it was for RSS. Most viewers of Reddit don't really create an account. The second is ease of use for publishers. I'm not going to set up a website, even a Wordpress blog now if I can just go post content on Reddit or Medium where I have a chance of people reading it. There are other things like consistent UX, etc.
  - heinrich5991 8y ago
    For Medium, I get what I expect: Some annoying "we've seen you here before" banner covering up the whole page. That usually doesn't happen for personal web pages.
homeaway2 8y ago
I don't understand why serving text content -- even a million times -- is so resource intensive that it has to be done on a hosted platform in 2018.
- anderspitman 8y ago
  Have you heard of Beaker/dat? https://beakerbrowser.com/ https://beakerbrowser.com/
  - mantis07 8y ago
    Yup checked it out. i found one more great app at https://blokada.win/android/ https://blokada.win/android/
    - fwip 8y ago
      How is an ad-blocker for android related to the discussion?
- heinrichhartman 8y ago
  What's the alternative? Self-hosting? Don't get me started on this. IMO hosting platforms are the only sane choice for blogs in 2018 and the foreseeable future. Also cost is a factor. Hosted solutions are essentially free (in particular GitHub Pages). A dedicated EC2 machine costs 5$/month upwards.

geoah 8y ago

I couldn't get it to load from the ipfs.io gateway, nor my local ipfs daemon, but I could through cloudeflare's ipfs gateway. https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipns/Qme48wyZ7LaF9gC5693DZyJBtehgaFhaKycESroemD5fNX/post/putting_this_blog_on_ipfs/ https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipns/Qme48wyZ7LaF9gC5693DZyJBteh...

leolambda 8y ago
That's the beauty of content-addressable networks! :) It's also available at regular-old https://leotindall.com/ https://leotindall.com/
- Groxx 8y ago
  And at their IPFS gateway: https://ipfs.leotindall.com/ipns/Qme48wyZ7LaF9gC5693DZyJBtehgaFhaKycESroemD5fNX/ https://ipfs.leotindall.com/ipns/Qme48wyZ7LaF9gC5693DZyJBteh... (not that that's functionally much different than the regular page, of course)
- sobani 8y ago
  Isn't this a failure of IPFS that you can't reliably get to the content even though you know it's address?
  - wink 8y ago
    Yeah, that's what I'd like to know. Being a total noob I enjoyed the article (thanks OP) then went on to wonder how this works. So first I thought it was available through all of these gateways, but then I read something about pinning - do the gateways pin the content? Or the "hosting nodes" (forgive my lack of knowledge about the terminology)?

neospice 8y ago

I was wondering about how to get NGINX to play with IPFS. Now I have a better idea. Thanks for sharing!

pervycreeper 8y ago

Could you explain why you think that Cloudflare's recent effort constitutes an attack on IPFS? That is, wouldn't the pinning of a large number of files, hosted on a fast CDN, be a good thing?

mcjiggerlog 8y ago
Ironically the only place that I can load the article is via https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipns/Qme48wyZ7LaF9gC5693DZyJBtehgaFhaKycESroemD5fNX/post/putting_this_blog_on_ipfs/ https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipns/Qme48wyZ7LaF9gC5693DZyJBteh...
- stcredzero 8y ago
  Is that why this link was posted?
leolambda 8y ago
Cloudflare's business model is intrinsically threatened by the existence of a global, distributed, and (basically) commons-supported CDN, because that would make their point-served, centralized, relatively expensive CDN obsolete.
- pervycreeper 8y ago
  You're implying that there's some ulterior-motive Embrace, Extend, Extinguish plan underlying this? Is there anything, however, in what they announced they will do that will have a negative effect, though?
- jazzyjackson 8y ago
  Agreed, and yet, isn't the point of the decentralized web that it will still be there when Cloudflare decides to drop the service?
- pshc 8y ago
  I think Cloudflare could easily co-exist, selling premium IPFS hosting for companies who want highly available and performant content. Not to mention they do much more than static CDN.

keyle 8y ago

Cool explanation. I found Cloudflare's explanation really well put. https://blog.cloudflare.com/distributed-web-gateway/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/distributed-web-gateway/ Since hosting a ipfs node feels like being an onion endpoint, can you restrict bandwidth? Also can you control the size of your local cache or how does it work with the replicated content?

leolambda 8y ago
Yes, and yes! There's a cache plus the concept of "pinning". Hosting a node is not quite like being an onion endpoint, because the bandwidth load gets shared out very quickly. Hosting a _gateway_ is a big bandwidth commitment, but I pay for lots of bandwidth for just that reason.
- keyle 8y ago
  If we compare hash content with http urls, urls are easy to remember, while hash are hard to remember? It feels like the dark ages before altavista, and you had to know the url. Still, a url was more memorable to pass friends by email, than a hash. Will there be ipfs search engines and wouldn't that just be bittorrent? Also browsers remember urls... If everything goes through your local gateway, it's all just /hash, hard to remember / re-discover? Or is the plan also to move away from browsers?
  - TUSF 8y ago
    Here's something of a search engine for IPFS: https://ipfs-search.com/ https://ipfs-search.com/ It works by crawling the DHT, though I don't think it's quite perfect yet. As for URLs vs Hashes, you point URLs to a hash through DNS TXT records.
  - MrEldritch 8y ago
    DNS works just fine for IPNS content-hash-addresses too, and heck, you can do that right now. You just use that, the same way you'd use anything else - just say that dweb.foo.xyz is associated with a particular IPNS address (and www.foo.xyz can be the regular ol' web address).

MrEldritch 8y ago

"Even if my server goes down, as long as these files are pinned somewhere, anyone should be able to use that IPNS name at another gateway and see the blog." This is also, in my opinion, the biggest objection to IPFS - that it really doesn't necessarily lead to any kind of true decentralized hosting unless someone else has decided to pin your files. And why would they? I understand that IPFS is supposed to prioritize connections based on seed/leach ratio like a typical torrent service, but I only torrent a few files at any given time and it's pretty trivial to set them to seed or disable manually; there's no way I'm going to make seed vs. don't seed decisions on every website I visit. So unless for some reason I specifically think to help share some webpage or other, it'll just get auto-deleted from my machine when it cycles out of the cache, as the automated stuff is what'll be keeping track of maintaining my seed/leech ratio, total disk usage for other people's content, upload limits, not leaving if you're one of the only seeders left, etc. In theory, IPFS could be even more prone to link-rot than the vanilla Web, depending on how many people try and actually depend on the decentralized hosting and end up having their files vanish once it's been a long enough time that nobody's still hosting them. And when there's so many different webpages, as opposed to just a few torrents, why would I think to pin any one thing in particular? Torrents can work based on charity and the need to maintain a particular seed/leech ratio; but I don't have the mental energy to bother deciding whether to be charitable about every dang website I visit. So this ends up meaning that IPFS works for popular, recent content, where there's enough people who have downloaded the content themselves recently enough that it's still in their cache to meaningfully take the load off the original host in serving that content. But you're not going to get dedicated long-term seeders of any particular site the way you do with highly-desirable files like pirate torrents. But generically, you will always need your own centralized server for any content you want to upload and make sure stays online long-term. As I understand it, this is sort of the problem Filecoin is trying to solve, but that has its own issues (it's hard to see how paying people to host your stuff on their own machines can ever be cost-competitive with paying AWS to do it).

MrEldritch 8y ago
Basically - why would anyone else have your files pinned somewhere?

stcredzero 8y ago

It’s a great technology, and of course that means that Cloudflare wants to run a monkey-in-the-middle attack on it. If you're publishing a service or a piece of software, and absolutely everyone is happy with it, you're doing something wrong.

johntash 8y ago

Is there any way to get a metric of how much something has been downloaded on ipfs? I'm guessing you would have to use google analytics or something?

tylersmith 8y ago
Correct. You can't see how many downloads a particular file has without some sort of outside observer.
TUSF 8y ago
I assume you mean metrics for how much something has been downloaded from a node you own, right? If so, you can monitor "ipfs log tail" for which blocks have been downloaded and by whom. You can also monitor how much content a specific peer has asked from you and such.

NelsonMinar 8y ago

Qme48wyZ7LaF9gC5693DZyJBtehgaFhaKycESroemD5fNX is a catchy thing to put in an URL.

leolambda 8y ago
As I say in my general post on the topic, IPNS is not meant for human use - DNS can be adapted to point to IPNS names just as easily as to point to IP addresses.

MentallyRetired 8y ago

I love the idea, but this needs to be MUCH simpler. If you're aiming for mainstream adoption, especially. I'm a developer and I don't want to go through the hassle of setting any of this up. I believe in the cause but damn I don't have time to become an expert in this tech. Any chance of a simple executable or installer/gui at some point?

frio 8y ago

There's been a few things cropping up in this space recently. On the topic of "indicating that this might be an outdated version", I've not managed to figure out a better solution than either linking to an IPNS index of document versions (so, for humans, some text that says "this might be out of date; check [here]), or running an IPFS node in JS on the browser and then querying for a later revision. I guess I'm looking forward to when browsers integrate with Dat, IPFS etc. natively (Beaker and Firefox are already heading down this path), so that I can rely on a little bit of Javascript that queries `window.IPFS` or some such, instead of having to send something much more heavyweight to the client. In the meantime, if anyone has any better ideas for solving that problem (rel=canonical to an IPNS entry? browser extensions?), I'm all ears :).

lgierth 8y ago
The ipfs-companion extension provides `window.IPFS` in Firefox, Chrome, and others :)
- frio 8y ago
  Yeah, that might be the only way to handle this reasonably in the short-term -- `if (window.IPFS) { fetch(revisionListFromAnIPNS).then(renderIt) }`... but my concern is that if the standard changes in the future and IPFS gets integrated into browsers/becomes `navigator.IPFS`/etc. -- then all those old, immutable pages are permanently going to check the wrong thing. Still, I guess that's a graceful degradation, because for people who don't have the extension today, they'd see the same behaviour. Perhaps it's best to provide a link to a revision list as the default behaviour, with the window.IPFS test as a mildly nicer progressive enhancement. Cheers :).

mantis07 8y ago

As I understand it, this is sort of the problem Filecoin is trying to solve, but that has its own issues (it's hard to see how paying people to host your stuff on their own machines can ever be cost-competitive with paying AWS to do it). http://newpipe.xyz http://newpipe.xyz

Nursie 8y ago
It can't - the moment that it becomes at all profitable to run an IPFS node, AWS and their competitors could undercut and effectively capture the market. Their costs are just lower, and will continue to be lower.

heinrichhartman 8y ago

Loading this page took a good 62 seconds to complete. That's 62seconds for a 78.7kb payload. (https://ibb.co/gqoUWe https://ibb.co/gqoUWe). At least at the present point, this is not a viable option for serving web-pages. What I do like about IPFS is that you get links to CONTENT as opposed to LOCATIONS. This is completely independent of the hosting aspects. It would be interesting to offer content links to blog posts. I provide at least a link to the GitHub version history at the bottom of my blog posts (e.g. http://heinrichhartmann.com/blog/Latency-SLOs.html http://heinrichhartmann.com/blog/Latency-SLOs.html). Not ideal but at least it gives you some idea what people might have seen at earlier point in time. In general, I see (at least) two different use cases for links: (1) Pointers: "If you want to learn more about this, check out this website" (2) Citations: "This website claims that there were 20 people at this event." For Pointers you want to have the latest version of the content served at high speed. For Citations you want content links, so you can be sure your readers see what you have seen, and don't care about retrieval performance that much. So there might be a case for Citation Links being hosted on IPFS. Services like archive.org / archive.is might consider integrating with IPFS, though I am not exactly sure how that would look like.

DailyHN 8y ago
Loaded in 1-2 seconds for me.

xte 8y ago

May I ask why IPFS instead of ZeroNet that's explicitly build to be a P2P distributed website platform and it's far more simple, lighter and clear than IPFS?

woodandsteel 8y ago

People point out that getting your data stored on ipfs is not guaranteed unless you pay for it. But there is a huge amount of unused storage space out there on people hd's. That means that once the market gets going, storage is going to be really cheap.