5 ms·
Why not publish the site over IPFS, that would make P2P hosting much simpler?
by Avamander 7y ago
Why not publish the site over IPFS, that would make P2P hosting much simpler?
- legatus 7y agoCurrently (at least for the-eye) it's about IPFS's barrier of entry. I expect LibGen's case to be similar. Most people don't know about it, and if even those that knew about it had to learn how IPFS works etc, they would probably just try to find the book they're looking for elsewhere.
- Avamander 7y agoTrue, I too find it not ideal, but having such a massive library available over it surely would increase the interest in lowering the barrier of entry?
- archi42 7y agoI am not fully aware how IPFS operates, but wouldn't it at least solve the back-end mirroring? Front-end servers would then "only" need to access IPFS for continuous syncing of metadata (for search) and fetching user-requested files (upon request).
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- wgjordan 7y agoNo need to conflate the frontend (the end-user interface that 'most people' use when trying to 'find the book they're looking for') with the mirroring/archiving backend (the distributed/p2p technology used to 'make sure LibGen never goes down'). The frontend would still be a user-friendly HTTP web-application (or collection of several) that pulls (portions of) the archive from the distributed/resilient backend to serve individual files to clients. The backend can be a relatively obscure, geeky, post-BitTorrent p2p software like IPFS or Dat, as long as those willing to donate bandwidth/storage can run it on their systems. This is a vastly different audience from 'most people'. The real question is which software's features best fits the backend use-case (efficiently hosting a very large and growing/evolving, IP-infringing dataset). Dat [1] has features to (1) update data and efficiently synchronize changes, and to (2) efficiently provide random-access data from larger datasets. Two quite compelling advancements over BitTorrent for this use-case. [1] https://docs.datproject.org/docs/faq#how-is-dat-different-than-academic-torrents-or-bittorrent https://docs.datproject.org/docs/faq#how-is-dat-different-th...
- traverseda 7y agoIn my experience ipfs doesn't actually work. I'd love to be proven wrong, but the reason why nobody uses ipfs even when it seems like a great fit is bect it's not really usable.
- StavrosK 7y agoThis is my experience as well. In theory, IPFS is exactly the right thing for LibGen, but in practice I consider it unusable.
- anchpop 7y agoHow would that work with adding new books and metadata? IPFS archives are immutable, right? I think something like Dat might be better because the people with the secret keys could update the archive and everyone else would automatically seed the updated version
- StavrosK 7y agoYou can just have it pin an IPNS CID, or you can publish a new hash for people to pin. There are ways. That said, maybe Dat would be better, especially if it works well.
- eitland 7y agoFWIW: StavrosK has actually been putting some serious effort into making IPFS accessible. See here for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16521385 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16521385
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- StavrosK 7y agoThank you, I really hope IPFS improves.
- traverseda 7y ago
- skjoldr 7y agoHow about Tahoe-LAFS? I haven't used it, but it should be stable by now. There's also ZeroNet, though IDK if it can handle the traffic.