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In 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 n

In 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 ago
This is my experience as well. In theory, IPFS is exactly the right thing for LibGen, but in practice I consider it unusable.
- anchpop 7y ago
  How 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 ago
    You 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 ago
  FWIW: 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 ago
    Thank you, I really hope IPFS improves.
  - traverseda 7y ago
    It's not really an accessibility issue so much as a performance one. If it was a reasonable alternative to something like the rsync daemon I'd use it all the time. Unfortunately the performance issues and overhead is just too much.
    - StavrosK 7y ago
      IPFS isn't really an alternative to rsync, but the rest of your point stands.
      - traverseda 7y ago
        Not in the general case, no. But one of the major uses for rsync in synchronizing mirrors, and it could very much be a replacement for rsync in that particular niche. For example mirroring project gutenburg.
        StavrosK 7y ago
        Ah, yes, you mean pinning a specific set, you're right. Unfortunately I've found that the way the daemon does pinning currently doesn't lend itself to that use case (a single unavailable file will stall the pin for hours).
        momack2 7y ago
        Better rsync support is actually in the works (though probably still a ~quarter out to land end to end in go-ipfs). The two main components are improving ipfs "mount" support, and adding metadata support into unixfs so we can only update modified files. See details here: https://github.com/ipfs/team-mgmt/blob/master/OKR/PACKAGE-MANAGERS.md https://github.com/ipfs/team-mgmt/blob/master/OKR/PACKAGE-MA... -- mount currently has IPNS read support but write support needs an owner to get it over the finish line and unixfsv1.5 (with metadata) should be landing in js-ipfs later this week!
- momack2 7y ago
  Sorry to hear about your bad experience, StavrosK. I think this perspective really depends how you're trying to use IPFS. For example, the ease of use of running a local IPFS node has improved a ton with IPFS-desktop & companion, and tools like ipfs-cohost (https://github.com/ipfs-shipyard/ipfs-cohost https://github.com/ipfs-shipyard/ipfs-cohost) also improve usability and tooling for shared community hosting. I think this has actually seen a ton of progress and end consumer usability has improved significantly in the past year (and is now even coming out-of-the-box in browsers like Brave and Opera!) I definitely hear that running a beefy IPFS node for local hosting/pinning still needs work, but pinning services like Infura, Temporal, and Pinata have helped abstract some of those challenges from individual applications like this. From a developer perspective, there are a lot of performance improvements for adding, data transfer, and content resolution coming down the line very soon (https://github.com/ipfs/go-ipfs/issues/6776 https://github.com/ipfs/go-ipfs/issues/6776), and there's also been a lot of work improving the ipfs gateways and docs to support the dev community better. I definitely think there is still lots of room for improvement - but also lots of progress to recognize in making IPFS usable to exactly these sorts of applications. Check out qri,io - they're doing collaborative dataset hosting like this and it's pretty slick!
  - StavrosK 7y ago
    You are correct, the end user experience has improved tremendously, I tried the desktop bundle the other day and it was indeed very easy to get started with. > pinning services like Infura, Temporal, and Pinata have helped abstract some of those challenges I wonder if you omitted Eternum on purpose :P (For context, I created and run Eternum, and that experience is mostly where my opinion of IPFS comes from.)
    - momack2 7y ago
      Gotcha! Thank you! Running a pinning service definitely still has rough edges =/ but I know the Infura team recently open sourced some of the tooling they built to make it a bit easier: https://blog.infura.io/new-tools-for-running-ipfs-nodes-196de636f079 https://blog.infura.io/new-tools-for-running-ipfs-nodes-196d.... Might help others who are self hosting a large chunk of data on a persistent node too... If you ever want to chat about how we can make pinning services on IPFS easier to run, would love to chat! I know cluster has been researching how to improve "IPFS for enterprise" usage and would really appreciate the user feedback!

In 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 ago

This is my experience as well. In theory, IPFS is exactly the right thing for LibGen, but in practice I consider it unusable.

anchpop 7y ago
How 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 ago
  You 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 ago
FWIW: 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 ago
  Thank you, I really hope IPFS improves.
- traverseda 7y ago
  It's not really an accessibility issue so much as a performance one. If it was a reasonable alternative to something like the rsync daemon I'd use it all the time. Unfortunately the performance issues and overhead is just too much.
  - StavrosK 7y ago
    IPFS isn't really an alternative to rsync, but the rest of your point stands.
    - traverseda 7y ago
      Not in the general case, no. But one of the major uses for rsync in synchronizing mirrors, and it could very much be a replacement for rsync in that particular niche. For example mirroring project gutenburg.
      - StavrosK 7y ago
        Ah, yes, you mean pinning a specific set, you're right. Unfortunately I've found that the way the daemon does pinning currently doesn't lend itself to that use case (a single unavailable file will stall the pin for hours).
      - momack2 7y ago
        Better rsync support is actually in the works (though probably still a ~quarter out to land end to end in go-ipfs). The two main components are improving ipfs "mount" support, and adding metadata support into unixfs so we can only update modified files. See details here: https://github.com/ipfs/team-mgmt/blob/master/OKR/PACKAGE-MANAGERS.md https://github.com/ipfs/team-mgmt/blob/master/OKR/PACKAGE-MA... -- mount currently has IPNS read support but write support needs an owner to get it over the finish line and unixfsv1.5 (with metadata) should be landing in js-ipfs later this week!
momack2 7y ago
Sorry to hear about your bad experience, StavrosK. I think this perspective really depends how you're trying to use IPFS. For example, the ease of use of running a local IPFS node has improved a ton with IPFS-desktop & companion, and tools like ipfs-cohost (https://github.com/ipfs-shipyard/ipfs-cohost https://github.com/ipfs-shipyard/ipfs-cohost) also improve usability and tooling for shared community hosting. I think this has actually seen a ton of progress and end consumer usability has improved significantly in the past year (and is now even coming out-of-the-box in browsers like Brave and Opera!) I definitely hear that running a beefy IPFS node for local hosting/pinning still needs work, but pinning services like Infura, Temporal, and Pinata have helped abstract some of those challenges from individual applications like this. From a developer perspective, there are a lot of performance improvements for adding, data transfer, and content resolution coming down the line very soon (https://github.com/ipfs/go-ipfs/issues/6776 https://github.com/ipfs/go-ipfs/issues/6776), and there's also been a lot of work improving the ipfs gateways and docs to support the dev community better. I definitely think there is still lots of room for improvement - but also lots of progress to recognize in making IPFS usable to exactly these sorts of applications. Check out qri,io - they're doing collaborative dataset hosting like this and it's pretty slick!
- StavrosK 7y ago
  You are correct, the end user experience has improved tremendously, I tried the desktop bundle the other day and it was indeed very easy to get started with. > pinning services like Infura, Temporal, and Pinata have helped abstract some of those challenges I wonder if you omitted Eternum on purpose :P (For context, I created and run Eternum, and that experience is mostly where my opinion of IPFS comes from.)
  - momack2 7y ago
    Gotcha! Thank you! Running a pinning service definitely still has rough edges =/ but I know the Infura team recently open sourced some of the tooling they built to make it a bit easier: https://blog.infura.io/new-tools-for-running-ipfs-nodes-196de636f079 https://blog.infura.io/new-tools-for-running-ipfs-nodes-196d.... Might help others who are self hosting a large chunk of data on a persistent node too... If you ever want to chat about how we can make pinning services on IPFS easier to run, would love to chat! I know cluster has been researching how to improve "IPFS for enterprise" usage and would really appreciate the user feedback!