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I agree that IPNS is pretty unusable (do names still expire after 1 day?). Last I saw, the IPFS devs seemed to be pretty excited by a pub/sub mechanism they we

I agree that IPNS is pretty unusable (do names still expire after 1 day?). Last I saw, the IPFS devs seemed to be pretty excited by a pub/sub mechanism they were building into the system; potentially to replace the workings of IPNS. Is that a stable or useful alternative for indexing changing content like a blog? How decentralised is the pub/sub (i.e. do new subscribers need to contact the publisher, or are messages persisted for a time in the network)?

momack2 7y ago
I think there's a proposal (https://github.com/libp2p/go-libp2p-pubsub/issues/175 https://github.com/libp2p/go-libp2p-pubsub/issues/175) and a PRs in progress (https://github.com/libp2p/go-libp2p-pubsub/pull/171 https://github.com/libp2p/go-libp2p-pubsub/pull/171) for IPNS over pubsub - still a WIP, but aims to address these performance challenges.
aschmahmann 7y ago
The way IPNS uses the DHT faces some deep challenges if you really need the “latest” IPNS update (if you don’t there are various ways to make IPNS perform significantly better, see https://discuss.ipfs.io/t/ipns-resolution-takes-a-very-long-time-first-time-around/5620 https://discuss.ipfs.io/t/ipns-resolution-takes-a-very-long-... for guidance). There is also some work to make IPNS work over PubSub independently from the DHT. That work is being tracked at https://github.com/ipfs/go-ipfs/issues/6447 https://github.com/ipfs/go-ipfs/issues/6447, and should significantly improve IPNS performance as well as add in features like allowing users other than the author to keep IPNS records alive (so no 1 day expiration issues). As for the decentralized nature of pubsub it is essentially an opt-in system. Random people on the network are not holding or forwarding your messages as they would in the DHT. However, anyone who has subscribed to a topic will propagate messages for you to other subscribers. This means subscribers do not need to directly contact the original IPNS record publisher to get a record, but instead can get it from anyone who has it and is advertising that they do so.

momack2 7y ago

I think there's a proposal (https://github.com/libp2p/go-libp2p-pubsub/issues/175 https://github.com/libp2p/go-libp2p-pubsub/issues/175) and a PRs in progress (https://github.com/libp2p/go-libp2p-pubsub/pull/171 https://github.com/libp2p/go-libp2p-pubsub/pull/171) for IPNS over pubsub - still a WIP, but aims to address these performance challenges.

aschmahmann 7y ago

The way IPNS uses the DHT faces some deep challenges if you really need the “latest” IPNS update (if you don’t there are various ways to make IPNS perform significantly better, see https://discuss.ipfs.io/t/ipns-resolution-takes-a-very-long-time-first-time-around/5620 https://discuss.ipfs.io/t/ipns-resolution-takes-a-very-long-... for guidance). There is also some work to make IPNS work over PubSub independently from the DHT. That work is being tracked at https://github.com/ipfs/go-ipfs/issues/6447 https://github.com/ipfs/go-ipfs/issues/6447, and should significantly improve IPNS performance as well as add in features like allowing users other than the author to keep IPNS records alive (so no 1 day expiration issues). As for the decentralized nature of pubsub it is essentially an opt-in system. Random people on the network are not holding or forwarding your messages as they would in the DHT. However, anyone who has subscribed to a topic will propagate messages for you to other subscribers. This means subscribers do not need to directly contact the original IPNS record publisher to get a record, but instead can get it from anyone who has it and is advertising that they do so.