13 ms·

Why build this blog, or anything, on IPFS?

302 points by beaucronin 7y ago

mceachen 7y ago
I've seen hugely varying IPFS latency. `time curl -o- https://teetotality.blog/posts/how-this-blog-was-made/` https://teetotality.blog/posts/how-this-blog-was-made/` took > 20 seconds, for example, yet https://ipfs.io/ipns/teetotality.blog/ https://ipfs.io/ipns/teetotality.blog/ returned in under a second. I'd be really interested in a "what to do and what not do" wrt IPFS to avoid those 20s (or completely non-functioning) URLs.
- capableweb 7y ago
  You're not really using IPFS here. The gateway that responds to the requests over at teetotality.blog is the one that actually communicates with IPFS, then forwarding the content to you. The traditional web works with the concept of timeouts set by the owner. So if you request some content, and it's unable to find it within X seconds, the request gets cancelled. IPFS (the network, not gateways) works differently, as the use case is different. Basically, there is no "requests". You simply put in a "ask" in the DHT about who has this content. If someone finds someone who provides the same content, then it tells you about it. IPFS in itself doesn't have any timeouts, as the model is different. The use case is basically "I need this content, no matter how long time it takes and from who". So, the difference between DNS addresses responding with different times, comes up to the maintainer of the gateway. Sometimes it's more connected to other nodes (like probably ipfs.io's gateways are) and sometimes they employ a longer cache for content (cloudflare's gateway have a long cache) and it makes the resolution time faster/slower.
rohan1024 7y ago
> even go super old-school and run a web server at home. It's not as if we're short on options in 2020. Though it's old school, it's incredibly difficult to run server at home now at least in India. The network I connect to is behind a NAT which is behind another NAT. At least that's what I saw when I tried to host my blog on Raspberry PI at home over a year ago. Ultimately I gave up on that endeavor. If anyone has solution that doesn't involve third party, please suggest. I think I will have to wait until my ISP implements IPv6. That could take another decade :/
- capableweb 7y ago
  Networks such as cjdns and secure scuttlebutt can help you overcome this problem, but introduces new ones (or introduces different models that are not already widely deployed) - [0] https://github.com/cjdelisle/cjdns/ https://github.com/cjdelisle/cjdns/ - [1] https://scuttlebutt.nz/ https://scuttlebutt.nz/
- johannes1234321 7y ago
  Your ISP implementing IPv6 won't be enough: One can't reach it from the outside, as long as not "everybody" else has IPv6.
  - rohan1024 7y ago
    Right. Couple of decades in that case.
  - Polylactic_acid 7y ago
    You don't need everyone on IPv6. Just most people. Then it becomes the issue of those still on v4
- iampims 7y ago
  You can always use https://ngrok.com https://ngrok.com and other similar "tunneling" solutions. It works like a charm: https://ngrok.com https://ngrok.com https://github.com/cloudflare/cloudflared https://github.com/cloudflare/cloudflared https://github.com/inlets/inlets https://github.com/inlets/inlets
  - jabedude 7y ago
    Thank you for all of these links. This is the first time I've heard of any of them. I especially like the inlets project.
- harlanji 7y ago
  I ran my vlog on RasPi and did everything in a static generated way. I configured Cloudflare to cache everything for 30 days. Finally I have a cache warming script that requests each static file after I purge the cache (could be better by only purging and warming changed files, like via a Makefile). With this approach, a tunnel with a public port and IP could run minimally during the purge/warm cycle and then be shut down. I solicit feedback via email rather than having public comments, and upcoming authenticated areas are done via Auth0 tokens.
endothrowho333 7y ago
It's pieces like these that remind me why good writing skills are important, and one shouldn't stray from the basics unless they're fully aware of the trade-offs. For this article, it would be: write a better hook, and make sure to include a rudimentary thesis statement, because I wasn't able to deduce what you were trying to persuade me of, within the first few paragraphs. With a title like "Why build this blog -- or anything -- on IPFS?" You were trying to persuade me, right? I had to read through what is essentially every single cooking recipe on the web, before I got to the actual filling. I.e a whole lotta aimless wandering and musing, that is only tangenitally related to the topic at hand, before giving me what the title promised. Similarily to cooking blogs, this page is 2/3 filler, and 1/3 actually giving me what the title promised "So……why IPFS?" > 1. Ownership, control, censorship The author goes on to chastise Medium's censorhsip practices, but not too long ago he mentioned self-hosted Wordpress and staticly-generated Github pages. Wordpress and Github pages get over these hurdles and are easier to setup than IPFS. > 2. Resilience Suffice to say, the point of this pargraph was "DNS and HTTP unrobust, webservers fail under unforseen circumstances." Ok, well how does IPFS do things differently? You never explained how IPFS works, much less how it gets over any of the aforementioned issues you outlined. > 3. Elegance > But I will say that content addressing strikes me, and many software people who come across it, as obviously superior to host-based addressing along certain dimensions. Never touched upon or elaborated. > Plus, it's super cool. You should try it! Atleast you have a call to action. Otherwise, this post fails to even come close to making me interested in IPFS.
- stanferder 7y ago
  I think bloggers deserve some leeway in how they write; it's an informal medium and maybe the author's usual audience is arriving with a lot of shared assumptions. Still, I wish IPFS had been defined within the post. I had to look it up on Wikipedia; presumably it's "Interplanetary File System".
  - endothrowho333 7y ago
    Yes, it occurred to me that his audience already had a background in IPFS and I wasn't his prospective audience; yet, then why craft the title to seem like it was meant for people who have no idea what IPFS is, because surely those with prior knowledge of it, would already be able to answer for themselves "Why... IPFS?" I think my main problem with this blog post, and many others, is that they come off too "stream of consciousness," instead of something more structured, and easily-digestable. It's obvious the author can write[0], but at risk of being presumptuous, it seems like it was hastily written and submitted to HN for the sole purpose of generating traffic. [0] This is a much better piece, albeit short: http://teetotality.blog/posts/think-do-build/ http://teetotality.blog/posts/think-do-build/
heelix 7y ago
ISPs have made it really expensive to get a static IP. I maintained a commercial connection for way to many years because I would remote into my home systems.
- zozbot234 7y ago
  That's not ISPs' doing, it's the natural outcome of IP address exhaustion. BTW, there are ways to "remote into" your home systems even if you don't have a static IP. You can even make it work if your home systems aren't directly accessible due to NAT.
  - paulhodge 7y ago
    Zerotier is an awesome tool for this.
- lostmsu 7y ago
  As long as it is not behind NAT, most DNS providers would let you easily change it via an API call.
- ajayyy 7y ago
  Not true in Canada
- boomlinde 7y ago
  That depends on the market where you are, I suppose. My home ISP offers static addresses as an add-on for a cost comparable to a cheap VPS. With my last ISP there was no static address offer, but the address was the same for years. You can use dyndns-like services for the worst case, then.
netfl0 7y ago
This blog is “built” on cloudflare apparently. Why is medium being compared to IPFS???
- endothrowho333 7y ago
  >This blog is “built” on cloudflare apparently. You can read more about why that is here: http://teetotality.blog/posts/how-this-blog-was-made/ http://teetotality.blog/posts/how-this-blog-was-made/
  - slacka 7y ago
    I found that too as the article linked raised more questions that it answered. I was like "how can I be reading this if it's not using DNS?" And from the link this explanation: > It updates a dnslink pointer at Cloudflare, which allows Cloudflare's DNS to direct teetotality.blog HTTP traffic to the correct IPFS hash address via their IPFS Gateway. So even though you've (probably) reached this page through a regular old HTTP link that uses the teetotality.blog host name, there is in fact no server with that name - the content is stored on various IPFS nodes, including but not limited to Cloudflare's edge caches.
    - thenewnewguy 7y ago
      The blog is hosted on IPFS. To allow normal web browsers without IPFS support to view the website they use Cloudflare's IPFS gateway, which is a service that serves content from IPFS over normal HTTP.
      - bureaucrat 7y ago
        i r o n y
      - netfl0 7y ago
        I’d be a bit more precise. The blog is hosted by cloudflare. IPFS hosts all the versions of the blog, none of which are canonical.
  - deleted 7y ago
imtringued 7y ago
I once thought about building an app based on IPFS but the problem is the lack of decentralized consensus. Only the Blockchain has cracked that problem and it is incredibly inefficient. The IPFS app would still require a central server and if that is the case then it would be better to just have some sort of public database backup with encrypted user data so that anyone can host their own fork and each fork can talk with each other through a standardized protocol. It would be a federated system like E-Mail.
EGreg 7y ago
I think IPFS should be a pluggable back-end among many back-ends that become possible once we move away from the idea that websites must be hosted by a specific server / domain and start thinking in terms of “client-first” architecture. I don’t want to write a wall of text, right now the top post on https://qbix.com/blog https://qbix.com/blog lays out several specific actionable things we can all do to bring about this future. It requires a snowball effect and a critical mass for any of this to take off.
meerita 7y ago
I have my own blog on DigitalOcean using Jekyll. Can't be more easy to do and mantain.
- azangru 7y ago
  > Can't be more easy to do and mantain. Sure it can. - Github pages - Netlify - Zeit All free for static sites; all easy to set up a continuous deployment pipeline for.
  - alwillis 7y ago
    I’ve been on Netlify for a while and it’s great at what it does. I recently went back to Digital Ocean for my side project because of what Netlify currently doesn’t have: DNSSEC, HTTP/2 push and prioritization. ECC certificates from Let’s Encrypt.
    - lmm 7y ago
      Why do you want ECC specifically? Isn't that an implementation detail?
      - alwillis 7y ago
        From a performance point of view, ECC certs are significantly smaller than RSA certs at a comparable level of security. Smaller certs translate to fewer bytes going over the wire when doing TLS handshakes, reducing latency. But it was really their lack of HTTP/2 push support and how their CDNs don't support H2 prioritization correctly[1] which annoyed me to the point of going back to Digital Ocean and running my own instance of H2o where I have full control.[2] 1. https://github.com/andydavies/http2-prioritization-issues https://github.com/andydavies/http2-prioritization-issues 2. https://h2o.examp1e.net/configure/http2_directives.html#http2-casper https://h2o.examp1e.net/configure/http2_directives.html#http...
        lmm 7y ago
        > Smaller certs translate to fewer bytes going over the wire when doing TLS handshakes, reducing latency. Provided it fits into a single Ethernet frame it's not going to make any difference, right?
TylerE 7y ago
Right now this case in point of why NOT to. ipfs resolve -r /ipns/teetotality.blog/posts/how-this-blog-was-made/%60: no link named "`" under QmefCQnxfw2qaT5WKMxiMVGTWu2i47ttpyUCDdn7f3nA2K
buboard 7y ago
Wordpress is unlike github pages or medium. In theory a LAMP server could run on everyone's home router, and they 'd publish their blog there. With commercial interest , network configurations would change to accomodate that, and people wouldn't lose their content when any service decides to shutdown. It's scary how much of the web is being lost , i would wager most links to nonocorporate sites > 10 years old barely work (has anyone studied the link rot?).
- zelly 7y ago
  I dream of the day when home routers have IPFS installed.
  - buboard 7y ago
    or webtorrent. but even a personal publishing server would also be great to keep people's data being controlled by megacorps
- momack2 7y ago
  Some estimates here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_rot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_rot -- the most recent listed study (2017) estimates a half life of ~2 years for an average link on Yahoo.
olodus 7y ago
Last I checked a lot of the consensus were that the Dat project was more mature than IPFS and that it had some advantages over IPFS (such as not using as much resources to run). How is it now? Is it more mature? Even though I actually even sub to their newsletter I haven't really been keeping up to date if they have made any major releases. Not to be a downer on IPFS at all, btw. I'm very glad that both it and Dat exist. IPFS has always seemed like a much larger undertaking and it is cool thst they are trying to push the dweb even further. We need that just as much as we need Dat, which with its inclusion in the Beaker browser for example really serves as a super cool demo of what dweb can give us in the future.
- StavrosK 7y ago
  I have quite a bit of experience with IPFS and I tried Dat once. It seems to me that Dat works much better, but I think the immutability of IPFS is its killer feature, Dat is thus much less interesting to me.
  - rakoo 7y ago
    Underlying dat data is immutable. It's the constructs built on top that provide mutability. Dat is fundamentally a chain of immutable chunks, some having a special meaning to say what the data means (file/folder) and where to look for it. Once a chunk is there it will 'ever ever change. It is perfectly possible to play with those only.
- kickscondor 7y ago
  Well, Beaker is being rethought and rewritten right now - hopefully it survives that process.
- momack2 7y ago
  You can check out this recent article comparing the two: https://medium.com/@jaygraber/comparing-ipfs-and-dat-8f3891d3a603 https://medium.com/@jaygraber/comparing-ipfs-and-dat-8f3891d... -- they have their own foci and technical decisions (ex IPFS is aiming for more general content addressing/deduplication of data across many hosts, while Dat focuses on append-only feeds from a particular source)
bsurmanski 7y ago
> From a certain perspective, the internet and the web as we know them (including fundamental technologies such as DNS, TCP/IP, HTTP, SMTP, and even Javascript) are flawed in fundamental ways. Leaving the technicalities aside, how do these flaws manifest? It is hard to stop bad actors from doing bad things: sending too many emails, stealing sensitive data, flooding websites with traffic, spreading false facts and bifurcating the shared reality that allowed for a democratic global order. I would argue that this is even more of a problem with decentralized services because there is no one to define (or police for) spam or bad content.
nullstyle 7y ago
IPFS still has a long way to go until it is useable in my opinion. The default configuration for the desktop client will gladly keep open 1000+ peer connections and will happily degrade your usual internet experience. In addition the ecosystem is filled with technical/community debt that makes navigating the system a nightmare for anyone who isn't an expert. As an example: https://github.com/ipfs/go-ipfs/issues/1482 https://github.com/ipfs/go-ipfs/issues/1482 It's a shame if you ask me.
- furi 7y ago
  To add to this there are* serious issues with naming. I wrote an app that ran on IPFS last year and throughout testing there was a persistent problem with needing to issue the testers with a new hash/link for each new version because IPNS, IPFS' decentralized naming solution, effectively doesn't work. It's supposed to give each node a unique name which can be repeatedly mapped to different hashes but publishing a new name -> hash mapping can take several minutes and then lookup of that name can take several minutes even on the node that published it in the first place. Names also need to be republished every 24 hours or so or they disappear from the network, which in my opinion harms the claims of decentralization. * = unless something has radically changed in the last few months and they just haven't closed the GitHub issue: https://github.com/ipfs/go-ipfs/issues/3860 https://github.com/ipfs/go-ipfs/issues/3860
  - Sargos 7y ago
    I consider IPNS fundamentally broken and have stopped using it. ENS is better in almost every way and is extremely reliable so it's not that big of deal.
    - momack2 7y ago
      IPFS and ENS work pretty seamlessly together (https://medium.com/the-ethereum-name-service/ethdns-9d56298fa38a https://medium.com/the-ethereum-name-service/ethdns-9d56298f...), but some folks also want the mutable pointers layer of IPNS too. We're working on making that faster: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XniIDIXU8RE&t=10s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XniIDIXU8RE&t=10s
kalmi10 7y ago
The thing I worry about with IPFS is privacy. If you use IPFS directly (as intended, not via a public gateway), and you visit a site, then you are automatically going to be seeding (like a torrent) the visited content, and thus you will be announcing/broadcasting the fact to the world that you (your node/your IP) have visited it. My current understanding is that this cannot really be avoided, since one needs to be able to find the nodes that have the content for any given hash.
- kordlessagain 7y ago
  IPFS isn't designed for private communications. It's designed for highly decentralized publishing of content. Safe, in this context, means the data is safe to "be".
  - kalmi10 7y ago
    I understand that no one is going to tamper with the data. Everybody (who is running a full node) is gonna get what they ask for, but then they are gonna go and announce it to the world that they have it, and that worries me privacy-wise.
    - kordlessagain 7y ago
      > that worries me privacy-wise This should be addressed by the client, not the server. The server's function is to serve the data, not serve data and pretend it doesn't know who it gave it to.
      - quindecagon 7y ago
        Since IPFS is peer to peer, who is the server in this context?
  - Polylactic_acid 7y ago
    Honestly I think the simplest and most effective method is to keep things as they are and have archive.org/.is keep backups of websites. A backup on archive.org is much more likely to stick around after 10 years than the users seeding a file.
cyounkins 7y ago
Has Cloudflare made any commitments regarding the longterm availability of their IPFS gateway?
- StavrosK 7y ago
  Probably not, but why does that matter? It's like asking whether Mozilla have made any commitments regarding the longterm availability of Thunderbird, just use another gateway or run your own.
  - momack2 7y ago
    The really awesome thing about gateways over central hosts is if one goes offline you can still easily access & verify the content from one of the many other gateways (https://ipfs.github.io/public-gateway-checker/ https://ipfs.github.io/public-gateway-checker/). =]
leshokunin 7y ago
Disclaimer: I run the unofficial IPFS Discord and Matrix (found at https://permaweb.io/discord https://permaweb.io/discord and /matrix) and have helped organize IPFS Meetups in SF. We also run an IPFS gateway and have built a groups app on top of IPFS and Textile. I generally agree with the conclusion, but there's a few downsides that aren't conveyed here. Let's look at the proposed upsides: 1) Ownership, control, censorship: That's partly correct. Ownership is fair, in the sense that you can run your node and self-host. However this is true of any self-hosting solution. You could run a Docker instance of a Wordpress or Ghost site and get ownership / control. 2) The point about censorship is muddied, however. I'll combine that point with the second upside: Resilience. Every day for the past two years, I've seen people wonder if IPFS is a magical cloud with infinite storage. People seem to think you put a file on IPFS, and it just gets replicated, censorship resistant hosting. That's not how it works. People need to pin your hash. You need to tell the world about your hash somehow. All this is done via a public list of IPs that is being broadcasted. Think of IPFS this way: you're letting people with the hash become CDNs of your content. That's cool, but that doesn't solve discovery, keeping things up, etc. IPFS doesn't encrypt the content, or the connectivity, or hide the hosts. Solutions exist around that, but they're niche, and honestly I question the motives besides just ideology. 3) Elegance. Yeah it's a really, really cool way to solve linking. As some others pointed out, it's not as fast as classic centralized links, so it's better suited currently for solutions that don't require speed.
- eaurouge 7y ago
  Interesting name choice. The term “permaweb” is typically associated with Arweave and their decentralized permanent storage offering [1]. 1. https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/05/how-arweave-permaweb-works/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/05/how-arweave-permaweb-works...
- zelly 7y ago
  > IPFS doesn't encrypt the content, or the connectivity, or hide the hosts. Solutions exist around that, but they're niche, and honestly I question the motives besides just ideology. I question the motives of people who would be against encryption, aside from it being a lot of work and just not having been done yet. Ideally: no one should know the true IPs of their peers, and no one snooping on the connection should be able to read anything useful. Even the contents of the files should be encrypted, but I struggle to see how that could be easily implemented (maybe like Mega.NZ does where the key is part of the URL). Otherwise it's going to be very hard to convince me to host arbitrary content from untrusted strangers. It's just pragmatic. No encryption = no plausible deniability.
neiman 7y ago
We run a blog on top of IPFS, and we use ENS (Ethereum Name Service) to keep it always updates. Basically you can access it if you use Opera browser or some browser extension. If not there are some gateways, like this: blog.almonit.eth.link
- Proven 7y ago
  such innovation! like Zeronet with Namecoin, only less original
aabhay 7y ago
Out of curiosity, isn’t the DNS gateway like Cloudflare (https://blog.cloudflare.com/distributed-web-gateway/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/distributed-web-gateway/) a single point of failure? Is there a solution to this without having to resort to a completely different desktop app?
- tylersmith 7y ago
  Well there are many gateways which provides redundancy but if ipfs really takes off I think it'll eventually need to be supported by browsers so that you're using your own ipfs node for lookups but it's seamless for you the user or developer.
  - momack2 7y ago
    Agreed - having a lot of gateways helps (https://ipfs.github.io/public-gateway-checker/ https://ipfs.github.io/public-gateway-checker/), but eventually integration directly with browsers is the upgrade path: https://blog.ipfs.io/2019-10-08-ipfs-browsers-update/ https://blog.ipfs.io/2019-10-08-ipfs-browsers-update/
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
jude- 7y ago
If you replace the word "IPFS" with "BitTorrent," this article is still true. Similarly, if you replace "IPFS" with "BitTorrent" in most of the comments here, the comments are still true. If you understand how BitTorrent works -- including its strengths and limitations -- you'll understand how IPFS works.
- sneak 7y ago
  Minor nit: BitTorrent does not allow one to maintain a persistent URI to changing/updated data, as IPNS does.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - jude- 7y ago
    Isn't that handled by mutable torrents a la BEP 46?
    - rakoo 7y ago
      Yes, but I'm not sure any dht client handles that functionality.
  - thomas 7y ago
    Not so minor!
  - Groxx 7y ago
    Depending on how you measure it: RSS feeds for updates fit this bill, and they've been around for a decade or more: https://github.com/KDE/ktorrent/blame/3ce105f4d1c3b4c178aaf3d5e84c431508cd6642/ChangeLog#L651 https://github.com/KDE/ktorrent/blame/3ce105f4d1c3b4c178aaf3...
    - sneak 7y ago
      RSS feeds are centralized and rely on web servers and DNS and are thus straightforward to censor or otherwise force offline via government orders, ddos, provider legal threats, et c.
Proven 7y ago
In conclusion, it makes no sense except as a science experiment. If you care about people consuming your content, you won't use IPFS.
sergioro 7y ago
Stopped reading after "Medium's engineers are much better at all of this than you will ever be"; can't take this writer seriously.
- K0SM0S 7y ago
  Might just be their way of being funny, I wouldn't read too much into it. Self-deprecation is a common social cue to trigger some light, mundane empathy: "I struggle, you struggle, (thus) we relate!" I blame it on the spirit that being last in school is way cooler than being first, and I suspect it's as old as humanity.
- robbya 7y ago
  I read this as: a group of professional engineers dedicated to hosting/scaling a platform designed for hosting blogs will perform better than a single random person managing a personal blog in their spare time. I generally think that's accurate.
- oska 7y ago
  I dislike this formula of "Stopped reading after ..." that I seem to be seeing more frequently. Why not just make your criticism of the quoted text straight up? Why the rhetorical flounce out of the room?
  - sergioro 7y ago
    I agree with your observation on how to improve my comment but the comment was past the edit grace period so i could not update it.
bureaucrat 7y ago
God, another IPFS shilling. Can't they come back when it's really usable?
anderspitman 7y ago
When I first learned about content addressing a couple years ago, it sounded like the holy grail. I'm less certain now. It seems much better from the machine perspective, but I'm not sure it matches closely enough the way humans interact with data. We are spatial and temporal creatures. There's something unsettling about my video file being chopped up into a million chunks and stored who-knows-where. Compared to the path/URL approach where I have a single large file. I know where it lives and how big it is. Moving/copying/deleting/updating/etc are all intuitive and map to analogs in the physical world. Content addressing (and object storage system I might add) isn't as easy to reason about. Don't get me wrong. Content addressing is very cool, and may revolutionize everything. It's very elegant. I'm just a bit skeptical.
- ithkuil 7y ago
  Technically content addressing and chunking (chopping up files) are two orthogonal techniques. You could envision a system where the hash of a single raw file (no matter how big it is) is it's identifier, and you can then have a mapping between that identifier and the locations (e.g. IP addresses) of servers who store the whole file.
  - anderspitman 7y ago
    You are of course correct. I was implying current content-addressing systems, such as IPFS.
lbj 7y ago
Im intriqued by the idea of IPFS, but it does seem like you're giving up a lot of control - Has this been used for anything >= mid-scale yet?
davidhbolton 7y ago
Off-topic but from work this site is blocked due to a security issue. Anyone know why?
spiderfarmer 7y ago
Good luck managing a website with 10 daily blog posts and multiple authors through static HTML files. The success of Wordpress is thanks to a lot more than "now you don't have to know HTML".
- dmos62 7y ago
  What's the problem with frequent updates and multiple authors? Those are solved problems. As long as everyone knows how to use the static site generator and git, you should be good.
jillesvangurp 7y ago
I'm involved with a startup that has been trying to use IPFS. There are still a few problems related to incentivizing people to pin files for you. Filecoin, the ICO coin associated with IPFS has been inching closer to a testnet launch for quite long now. That was supposed to happen end of last year and it didn't as far as I know. So, they are obviously a bit behind schedule on that. Without that, content on IPFS is only as durable as the node that uploaded the content. There are no guarantees long term availability of content. So, IPFS is more of a CDN than a file system currently. It's a distributed content cache. There's an enormous long tail of files that are only available on 1 node, which is typically somebody's laptop. Another problem is that the block system does not combine well with e.g. s3 or similar file buckets on popular cloud providers. If you think of IPFS as a CDN then you basically have to worry about hosting files somewhere that is reliable and durable. IPFS does not solve that problem currently. So, you basically will either be self hosting some file servers or use something off the shelf, like S3. There's an S3 backend for IPFS but it's a bit unclear how well that performs. We've done some tests with it and the small blocksize is creating quite a bit of overhead for read and write HTTP requests. Access control or privacy protection are currently not really in scope of IPFS. I doubt this is a good tool for bypassing e.g. censor ship unless you are willing to expose yourself to explaining why your node is hosting certain content hashes. TOR and I2P probably provide better protection here. I2P actually runs a variant of bittorrent for file sharing. It's been a while since I looked at this but it used to be quite slow but reliable.
kdtsh 7y ago
I think one of the interesting use cases for IPFS is having a distributed build store for tools like Nix and Guix. It sounds to me like almost the perfect case for it: an immutable datastore of hashes of reproducible builds is well suited to distributed storage. Imagine being able to peek into a global store of build outputs and, for the hash of any given inputs, retrieve some corresponding output. It would be an incredibly unique experience. There’s a proof of concept of building IPFS into Guix’s store[1]. There’s also periodically discussion on the mailing list. I’m sure it’s much more complicated than I’m giving it credit for, and there would be security and social implications (someone’s going to be building most of the software, and what happens if you have low bandwidth or a small data plan?) Still, IPFS sounds like an interesting experiment in this area. [1] https://github.com/fps/guix-ipfs-cache https://github.com/fps/guix-ipfs-cache
fiatjaf 7y ago
I once fell for this talk about "content-addressing". You know what? Saying stuff is addressed by their content doesn't change the fact that the internet is "location-addressed" and you still have to know where peers that have the data you want are and connect to them. And what is the solution for that? A DHT! Turns out DHTs have terrible incentive structure and don't seem to be working well. Downloading content on IPFS is the _most slow experience ever_ and for some reason I don't understand downloading is even slower. Even if you are in the same LAN of another machine that has the content you need it will still take hours to download some small file you would do in seconds with `scp`. Now even if you know which peer has the content you want and tell IPFS to connect to it directly and the connection is established and the is being (slowly) downloaded... IPFS will drop the connection and the download will stop.
fulldecent2 7y ago
The long-term solution for web is: - Use more static HTML - Since your assets are versioned and static, start calculating hashes for everything you publish - When you link to something, include the URL and the integrity <a href="URL" integrity="sha256:...">...</a> In the immediate future this will fix broken links. Things that are important will be cached and accessible via content addressing. In the long-term future this will fix other problems like linking to a page and then it being changed to something you don't endorse.
thomas232233 7y ago
All the docs tells about to setup IPFS server. What is the intended way to browse ipfs sites(extensions , or new browser ) ?

302 points by beaucronin 7y ago

I've seen hugely varying IPFS latency. `time curl -o- https://teetotality.blog/posts/how-this-blog-was-made/` https://teetotality.blog/posts/how-this-blog-was-made/` took > 20 seconds, for example, yet https://ipfs.io/ipns/teetotality.blog/ https://ipfs.io/ipns/teetotality.blog/ returned in under a second. I'd be really interested in a "what to do and what not do" wrt IPFS to avoid those 20s (or completely non-functioning) URLs.

capableweb 7y ago
You're not really using IPFS here. The gateway that responds to the requests over at teetotality.blog is the one that actually communicates with IPFS, then forwarding the content to you. The traditional web works with the concept of timeouts set by the owner. So if you request some content, and it's unable to find it within X seconds, the request gets cancelled. IPFS (the network, not gateways) works differently, as the use case is different. Basically, there is no "requests". You simply put in a "ask" in the DHT about who has this content. If someone finds someone who provides the same content, then it tells you about it. IPFS in itself doesn't have any timeouts, as the model is different. The use case is basically "I need this content, no matter how long time it takes and from who". So, the difference between DNS addresses responding with different times, comes up to the maintainer of the gateway. Sometimes it's more connected to other nodes (like probably ipfs.io's gateways are) and sometimes they employ a longer cache for content (cloudflare's gateway have a long cache) and it makes the resolution time faster/slower.

rohan1024 7y ago

> even go super old-school and run a web server at home. It's not as if we're short on options in 2020. Though it's old school, it's incredibly difficult to run server at home now at least in India. The network I connect to is behind a NAT which is behind another NAT. At least that's what I saw when I tried to host my blog on Raspberry PI at home over a year ago. Ultimately I gave up on that endeavor. If anyone has solution that doesn't involve third party, please suggest. I think I will have to wait until my ISP implements IPv6. That could take another decade :/

capableweb 7y ago
Networks such as cjdns and secure scuttlebutt can help you overcome this problem, but introduces new ones (or introduces different models that are not already widely deployed) - [0] https://github.com/cjdelisle/cjdns/ https://github.com/cjdelisle/cjdns/ - [1] https://scuttlebutt.nz/ https://scuttlebutt.nz/
johannes1234321 7y ago
Your ISP implementing IPv6 won't be enough: One can't reach it from the outside, as long as not "everybody" else has IPv6.
- rohan1024 7y ago
  Right. Couple of decades in that case.
- Polylactic_acid 7y ago
  You don't need everyone on IPv6. Just most people. Then it becomes the issue of those still on v4
iampims 7y ago
You can always use https://ngrok.com https://ngrok.com and other similar "tunneling" solutions. It works like a charm: https://ngrok.com https://ngrok.com https://github.com/cloudflare/cloudflared https://github.com/cloudflare/cloudflared https://github.com/inlets/inlets https://github.com/inlets/inlets
- jabedude 7y ago
  Thank you for all of these links. This is the first time I've heard of any of them. I especially like the inlets project.
harlanji 7y ago
I ran my vlog on RasPi and did everything in a static generated way. I configured Cloudflare to cache everything for 30 days. Finally I have a cache warming script that requests each static file after I purge the cache (could be better by only purging and warming changed files, like via a Makefile). With this approach, a tunnel with a public port and IP could run minimally during the purge/warm cycle and then be shut down. I solicit feedback via email rather than having public comments, and upcoming authenticated areas are done via Auth0 tokens.

endothrowho333 7y ago

It's pieces like these that remind me why good writing skills are important, and one shouldn't stray from the basics unless they're fully aware of the trade-offs. For this article, it would be: write a better hook, and make sure to include a rudimentary thesis statement, because I wasn't able to deduce what you were trying to persuade me of, within the first few paragraphs. With a title like "Why build this blog -- or anything -- on IPFS?" You were trying to persuade me, right? I had to read through what is essentially every single cooking recipe on the web, before I got to the actual filling. I.e a whole lotta aimless wandering and musing, that is only tangenitally related to the topic at hand, before giving me what the title promised. Similarily to cooking blogs, this page is 2/3 filler, and 1/3 actually giving me what the title promised "So……why IPFS?" > 1. Ownership, control, censorship The author goes on to chastise Medium's censorhsip practices, but not too long ago he mentioned self-hosted Wordpress and staticly-generated Github pages. Wordpress and Github pages get over these hurdles and are easier to setup than IPFS. > 2. Resilience Suffice to say, the point of this pargraph was "DNS and HTTP unrobust, webservers fail under unforseen circumstances." Ok, well how does IPFS do things differently? You never explained how IPFS works, much less how it gets over any of the aforementioned issues you outlined. > 3. Elegance > But I will say that content addressing strikes me, and many software people who come across it, as obviously superior to host-based addressing along certain dimensions. Never touched upon or elaborated. > Plus, it's super cool. You should try it! Atleast you have a call to action. Otherwise, this post fails to even come close to making me interested in IPFS.

stanferder 7y ago
I think bloggers deserve some leeway in how they write; it's an informal medium and maybe the author's usual audience is arriving with a lot of shared assumptions. Still, I wish IPFS had been defined within the post. I had to look it up on Wikipedia; presumably it's "Interplanetary File System".
- endothrowho333 7y ago
  Yes, it occurred to me that his audience already had a background in IPFS and I wasn't his prospective audience; yet, then why craft the title to seem like it was meant for people who have no idea what IPFS is, because surely those with prior knowledge of it, would already be able to answer for themselves "Why... IPFS?" I think my main problem with this blog post, and many others, is that they come off too "stream of consciousness," instead of something more structured, and easily-digestable. It's obvious the author can write[0], but at risk of being presumptuous, it seems like it was hastily written and submitted to HN for the sole purpose of generating traffic. [0] This is a much better piece, albeit short: http://teetotality.blog/posts/think-do-build/ http://teetotality.blog/posts/think-do-build/

heelix 7y ago

ISPs have made it really expensive to get a static IP. I maintained a commercial connection for way to many years because I would remote into my home systems.

zozbot234 7y ago
That's not ISPs' doing, it's the natural outcome of IP address exhaustion. BTW, there are ways to "remote into" your home systems even if you don't have a static IP. You can even make it work if your home systems aren't directly accessible due to NAT.
- paulhodge 7y ago
  Zerotier is an awesome tool for this.
lostmsu 7y ago
As long as it is not behind NAT, most DNS providers would let you easily change it via an API call.
ajayyy 7y ago
Not true in Canada
boomlinde 7y ago
That depends on the market where you are, I suppose. My home ISP offers static addresses as an add-on for a cost comparable to a cheap VPS. With my last ISP there was no static address offer, but the address was the same for years. You can use dyndns-like services for the worst case, then.

netfl0 7y ago

This blog is “built” on cloudflare apparently. Why is medium being compared to IPFS???

endothrowho333 7y ago
>This blog is “built” on cloudflare apparently. You can read more about why that is here: http://teetotality.blog/posts/how-this-blog-was-made/ http://teetotality.blog/posts/how-this-blog-was-made/
- slacka 7y ago
  I found that too as the article linked raised more questions that it answered. I was like "how can I be reading this if it's not using DNS?" And from the link this explanation: > It updates a dnslink pointer at Cloudflare, which allows Cloudflare's DNS to direct teetotality.blog HTTP traffic to the correct IPFS hash address via their IPFS Gateway. So even though you've (probably) reached this page through a regular old HTTP link that uses the teetotality.blog host name, there is in fact no server with that name - the content is stored on various IPFS nodes, including but not limited to Cloudflare's edge caches.
  - thenewnewguy 7y ago
    The blog is hosted on IPFS. To allow normal web browsers without IPFS support to view the website they use Cloudflare's IPFS gateway, which is a service that serves content from IPFS over normal HTTP.
    - bureaucrat 7y ago
      i r o n y
    - netfl0 7y ago
      I’d be a bit more precise. The blog is hosted by cloudflare. IPFS hosts all the versions of the blog, none of which are canonical.
- deleted 7y ago

imtringued 7y ago

I once thought about building an app based on IPFS but the problem is the lack of decentralized consensus. Only the Blockchain has cracked that problem and it is incredibly inefficient. The IPFS app would still require a central server and if that is the case then it would be better to just have some sort of public database backup with encrypted user data so that anyone can host their own fork and each fork can talk with each other through a standardized protocol. It would be a federated system like E-Mail.

EGreg 7y ago

I think IPFS should be a pluggable back-end among many back-ends that become possible once we move away from the idea that websites must be hosted by a specific server / domain and start thinking in terms of “client-first” architecture. I don’t want to write a wall of text, right now the top post on https://qbix.com/blog https://qbix.com/blog lays out several specific actionable things we can all do to bring about this future. It requires a snowball effect and a critical mass for any of this to take off.

meerita 7y ago

I have my own blog on DigitalOcean using Jekyll. Can't be more easy to do and mantain.

azangru 7y ago
> Can't be more easy to do and mantain. Sure it can. - Github pages - Netlify - Zeit All free for static sites; all easy to set up a continuous deployment pipeline for.
- alwillis 7y ago
  I’ve been on Netlify for a while and it’s great at what it does. I recently went back to Digital Ocean for my side project because of what Netlify currently doesn’t have: DNSSEC, HTTP/2 push and prioritization. ECC certificates from Let’s Encrypt.
  - lmm 7y ago
    Why do you want ECC specifically? Isn't that an implementation detail?
    - alwillis 7y ago
      From a performance point of view, ECC certs are significantly smaller than RSA certs at a comparable level of security. Smaller certs translate to fewer bytes going over the wire when doing TLS handshakes, reducing latency. But it was really their lack of HTTP/2 push support and how their CDNs don't support H2 prioritization correctly[1] which annoyed me to the point of going back to Digital Ocean and running my own instance of H2o where I have full control.[2] 1. https://github.com/andydavies/http2-prioritization-issues https://github.com/andydavies/http2-prioritization-issues 2. https://h2o.examp1e.net/configure/http2_directives.html#http2-casper https://h2o.examp1e.net/configure/http2_directives.html#http...
      - lmm 7y ago
        > Smaller certs translate to fewer bytes going over the wire when doing TLS handshakes, reducing latency. Provided it fits into a single Ethernet frame it's not going to make any difference, right?

TylerE 7y ago

Right now this case in point of why NOT to. ipfs resolve -r /ipns/teetotality.blog/posts/how-this-blog-was-made/%60: no link named "`" under QmefCQnxfw2qaT5WKMxiMVGTWu2i47ttpyUCDdn7f3nA2K

buboard 7y ago

Wordpress is unlike github pages or medium. In theory a LAMP server could run on everyone's home router, and they 'd publish their blog there. With commercial interest , network configurations would change to accomodate that, and people wouldn't lose their content when any service decides to shutdown. It's scary how much of the web is being lost , i would wager most links to nonocorporate sites > 10 years old barely work (has anyone studied the link rot?).

zelly 7y ago
I dream of the day when home routers have IPFS installed.
- buboard 7y ago
  or webtorrent. but even a personal publishing server would also be great to keep people's data being controlled by megacorps
momack2 7y ago
Some estimates here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_rot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_rot -- the most recent listed study (2017) estimates a half life of ~2 years for an average link on Yahoo.

olodus 7y ago

Last I checked a lot of the consensus were that the Dat project was more mature than IPFS and that it had some advantages over IPFS (such as not using as much resources to run). How is it now? Is it more mature? Even though I actually even sub to their newsletter I haven't really been keeping up to date if they have made any major releases. Not to be a downer on IPFS at all, btw. I'm very glad that both it and Dat exist. IPFS has always seemed like a much larger undertaking and it is cool thst they are trying to push the dweb even further. We need that just as much as we need Dat, which with its inclusion in the Beaker browser for example really serves as a super cool demo of what dweb can give us in the future.

StavrosK 7y ago
I have quite a bit of experience with IPFS and I tried Dat once. It seems to me that Dat works much better, but I think the immutability of IPFS is its killer feature, Dat is thus much less interesting to me.
- rakoo 7y ago
  Underlying dat data is immutable. It's the constructs built on top that provide mutability. Dat is fundamentally a chain of immutable chunks, some having a special meaning to say what the data means (file/folder) and where to look for it. Once a chunk is there it will 'ever ever change. It is perfectly possible to play with those only.
kickscondor 7y ago
Well, Beaker is being rethought and rewritten right now - hopefully it survives that process.
momack2 7y ago
You can check out this recent article comparing the two: https://medium.com/@jaygraber/comparing-ipfs-and-dat-8f3891d3a603 https://medium.com/@jaygraber/comparing-ipfs-and-dat-8f3891d... -- they have their own foci and technical decisions (ex IPFS is aiming for more general content addressing/deduplication of data across many hosts, while Dat focuses on append-only feeds from a particular source)

bsurmanski 7y ago

> From a certain perspective, the internet and the web as we know them (including fundamental technologies such as DNS, TCP/IP, HTTP, SMTP, and even Javascript) are flawed in fundamental ways. Leaving the technicalities aside, how do these flaws manifest? It is hard to stop bad actors from doing bad things: sending too many emails, stealing sensitive data, flooding websites with traffic, spreading false facts and bifurcating the shared reality that allowed for a democratic global order. I would argue that this is even more of a problem with decentralized services because there is no one to define (or police for) spam or bad content.

nullstyle 7y ago

IPFS still has a long way to go until it is useable in my opinion. The default configuration for the desktop client will gladly keep open 1000+ peer connections and will happily degrade your usual internet experience. In addition the ecosystem is filled with technical/community debt that makes navigating the system a nightmare for anyone who isn't an expert. As an example: https://github.com/ipfs/go-ipfs/issues/1482 https://github.com/ipfs/go-ipfs/issues/1482 It's a shame if you ask me.

furi 7y ago
To add to this there are* serious issues with naming. I wrote an app that ran on IPFS last year and throughout testing there was a persistent problem with needing to issue the testers with a new hash/link for each new version because IPNS, IPFS' decentralized naming solution, effectively doesn't work. It's supposed to give each node a unique name which can be repeatedly mapped to different hashes but publishing a new name -> hash mapping can take several minutes and then lookup of that name can take several minutes even on the node that published it in the first place. Names also need to be republished every 24 hours or so or they disappear from the network, which in my opinion harms the claims of decentralization. * = unless something has radically changed in the last few months and they just haven't closed the GitHub issue: https://github.com/ipfs/go-ipfs/issues/3860 https://github.com/ipfs/go-ipfs/issues/3860
- Sargos 7y ago
  I consider IPNS fundamentally broken and have stopped using it. ENS is better in almost every way and is extremely reliable so it's not that big of deal.
  - momack2 7y ago
    IPFS and ENS work pretty seamlessly together (https://medium.com/the-ethereum-name-service/ethdns-9d56298fa38a https://medium.com/the-ethereum-name-service/ethdns-9d56298f...), but some folks also want the mutable pointers layer of IPNS too. We're working on making that faster: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XniIDIXU8RE&t=10s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XniIDIXU8RE&t=10s

kalmi10 7y ago

The thing I worry about with IPFS is privacy. If you use IPFS directly (as intended, not via a public gateway), and you visit a site, then you are automatically going to be seeding (like a torrent) the visited content, and thus you will be announcing/broadcasting the fact to the world that you (your node/your IP) have visited it. My current understanding is that this cannot really be avoided, since one needs to be able to find the nodes that have the content for any given hash.

kordlessagain 7y ago
IPFS isn't designed for private communications. It's designed for highly decentralized publishing of content. Safe, in this context, means the data is safe to "be".
- kalmi10 7y ago
  I understand that no one is going to tamper with the data. Everybody (who is running a full node) is gonna get what they ask for, but then they are gonna go and announce it to the world that they have it, and that worries me privacy-wise.
  - kordlessagain 7y ago
    > that worries me privacy-wise This should be addressed by the client, not the server. The server's function is to serve the data, not serve data and pretend it doesn't know who it gave it to.
    - quindecagon 7y ago
      Since IPFS is peer to peer, who is the server in this context?
- Polylactic_acid 7y ago
  Honestly I think the simplest and most effective method is to keep things as they are and have archive.org/.is keep backups of websites. A backup on archive.org is much more likely to stick around after 10 years than the users seeding a file.

cyounkins 7y ago

Has Cloudflare made any commitments regarding the longterm availability of their IPFS gateway?

StavrosK 7y ago
Probably not, but why does that matter? It's like asking whether Mozilla have made any commitments regarding the longterm availability of Thunderbird, just use another gateway or run your own.
- momack2 7y ago
  The really awesome thing about gateways over central hosts is if one goes offline you can still easily access & verify the content from one of the many other gateways (https://ipfs.github.io/public-gateway-checker/ https://ipfs.github.io/public-gateway-checker/). =]

leshokunin 7y ago

Disclaimer: I run the unofficial IPFS Discord and Matrix (found at https://permaweb.io/discord https://permaweb.io/discord and /matrix) and have helped organize IPFS Meetups in SF. We also run an IPFS gateway and have built a groups app on top of IPFS and Textile. I generally agree with the conclusion, but there's a few downsides that aren't conveyed here. Let's look at the proposed upsides: 1) Ownership, control, censorship: That's partly correct. Ownership is fair, in the sense that you can run your node and self-host. However this is true of any self-hosting solution. You could run a Docker instance of a Wordpress or Ghost site and get ownership / control. 2) The point about censorship is muddied, however. I'll combine that point with the second upside: Resilience. Every day for the past two years, I've seen people wonder if IPFS is a magical cloud with infinite storage. People seem to think you put a file on IPFS, and it just gets replicated, censorship resistant hosting. That's not how it works. People need to pin your hash. You need to tell the world about your hash somehow. All this is done via a public list of IPs that is being broadcasted. Think of IPFS this way: you're letting people with the hash become CDNs of your content. That's cool, but that doesn't solve discovery, keeping things up, etc. IPFS doesn't encrypt the content, or the connectivity, or hide the hosts. Solutions exist around that, but they're niche, and honestly I question the motives besides just ideology. 3) Elegance. Yeah it's a really, really cool way to solve linking. As some others pointed out, it's not as fast as classic centralized links, so it's better suited currently for solutions that don't require speed.

eaurouge 7y ago
Interesting name choice. The term “permaweb” is typically associated with Arweave and their decentralized permanent storage offering [1]. 1. https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/05/how-arweave-permaweb-works/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/05/how-arweave-permaweb-works...
zelly 7y ago
> IPFS doesn't encrypt the content, or the connectivity, or hide the hosts. Solutions exist around that, but they're niche, and honestly I question the motives besides just ideology. I question the motives of people who would be against encryption, aside from it being a lot of work and just not having been done yet. Ideally: no one should know the true IPs of their peers, and no one snooping on the connection should be able to read anything useful. Even the contents of the files should be encrypted, but I struggle to see how that could be easily implemented (maybe like Mega.NZ does where the key is part of the URL). Otherwise it's going to be very hard to convince me to host arbitrary content from untrusted strangers. It's just pragmatic. No encryption = no plausible deniability.

neiman 7y ago

We run a blog on top of IPFS, and we use ENS (Ethereum Name Service) to keep it always updates. Basically you can access it if you use Opera browser or some browser extension. If not there are some gateways, like this: blog.almonit.eth.link

Proven 7y ago
such innovation! like Zeronet with Namecoin, only less original

aabhay 7y ago

Out of curiosity, isn’t the DNS gateway like Cloudflare (https://blog.cloudflare.com/distributed-web-gateway/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/distributed-web-gateway/) a single point of failure? Is there a solution to this without having to resort to a completely different desktop app?

tylersmith 7y ago
Well there are many gateways which provides redundancy but if ipfs really takes off I think it'll eventually need to be supported by browsers so that you're using your own ipfs node for lookups but it's seamless for you the user or developer.
- momack2 7y ago
  Agreed - having a lot of gateways helps (https://ipfs.github.io/public-gateway-checker/ https://ipfs.github.io/public-gateway-checker/), but eventually integration directly with browsers is the upgrade path: https://blog.ipfs.io/2019-10-08-ipfs-browsers-update/ https://blog.ipfs.io/2019-10-08-ipfs-browsers-update/
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

jude- 7y ago

If you replace the word "IPFS" with "BitTorrent," this article is still true. Similarly, if you replace "IPFS" with "BitTorrent" in most of the comments here, the comments are still true. If you understand how BitTorrent works -- including its strengths and limitations -- you'll understand how IPFS works.

sneak 7y ago
Minor nit: BitTorrent does not allow one to maintain a persistent URI to changing/updated data, as IPNS does.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- jude- 7y ago
  Isn't that handled by mutable torrents a la BEP 46?
  - rakoo 7y ago
    Yes, but I'm not sure any dht client handles that functionality.
- thomas 7y ago
  Not so minor!
- Groxx 7y ago
  Depending on how you measure it: RSS feeds for updates fit this bill, and they've been around for a decade or more: https://github.com/KDE/ktorrent/blame/3ce105f4d1c3b4c178aaf3d5e84c431508cd6642/ChangeLog#L651 https://github.com/KDE/ktorrent/blame/3ce105f4d1c3b4c178aaf3...
  - sneak 7y ago
    RSS feeds are centralized and rely on web servers and DNS and are thus straightforward to censor or otherwise force offline via government orders, ddos, provider legal threats, et c.

Proven 7y ago

In conclusion, it makes no sense except as a science experiment. If you care about people consuming your content, you won't use IPFS.

sergioro 7y ago

Stopped reading after "Medium's engineers are much better at all of this than you will ever be"; can't take this writer seriously.

K0SM0S 7y ago
Might just be their way of being funny, I wouldn't read too much into it. Self-deprecation is a common social cue to trigger some light, mundane empathy: "I struggle, you struggle, (thus) we relate!" I blame it on the spirit that being last in school is way cooler than being first, and I suspect it's as old as humanity.
robbya 7y ago
I read this as: a group of professional engineers dedicated to hosting/scaling a platform designed for hosting blogs will perform better than a single random person managing a personal blog in their spare time. I generally think that's accurate.
oska 7y ago
I dislike this formula of "Stopped reading after ..." that I seem to be seeing more frequently. Why not just make your criticism of the quoted text straight up? Why the rhetorical flounce out of the room?
- sergioro 7y ago
  I agree with your observation on how to improve my comment but the comment was past the edit grace period so i could not update it.

bureaucrat 7y ago

God, another IPFS shilling. Can't they come back when it's really usable?

anderspitman 7y ago

When I first learned about content addressing a couple years ago, it sounded like the holy grail. I'm less certain now. It seems much better from the machine perspective, but I'm not sure it matches closely enough the way humans interact with data. We are spatial and temporal creatures. There's something unsettling about my video file being chopped up into a million chunks and stored who-knows-where. Compared to the path/URL approach where I have a single large file. I know where it lives and how big it is. Moving/copying/deleting/updating/etc are all intuitive and map to analogs in the physical world. Content addressing (and object storage system I might add) isn't as easy to reason about. Don't get me wrong. Content addressing is very cool, and may revolutionize everything. It's very elegant. I'm just a bit skeptical.

ithkuil 7y ago
Technically content addressing and chunking (chopping up files) are two orthogonal techniques. You could envision a system where the hash of a single raw file (no matter how big it is) is it's identifier, and you can then have a mapping between that identifier and the locations (e.g. IP addresses) of servers who store the whole file.
- anderspitman 7y ago
  You are of course correct. I was implying current content-addressing systems, such as IPFS.

lbj 7y ago

Im intriqued by the idea of IPFS, but it does seem like you're giving up a lot of control - Has this been used for anything >= mid-scale yet?

davidhbolton 7y ago

Off-topic but from work this site is blocked due to a security issue. Anyone know why?

spiderfarmer 7y ago

Good luck managing a website with 10 daily blog posts and multiple authors through static HTML files. The success of Wordpress is thanks to a lot more than "now you don't have to know HTML".

dmos62 7y ago
What's the problem with frequent updates and multiple authors? Those are solved problems. As long as everyone knows how to use the static site generator and git, you should be good.

jillesvangurp 7y ago

I'm involved with a startup that has been trying to use IPFS. There are still a few problems related to incentivizing people to pin files for you. Filecoin, the ICO coin associated with IPFS has been inching closer to a testnet launch for quite long now. That was supposed to happen end of last year and it didn't as far as I know. So, they are obviously a bit behind schedule on that. Without that, content on IPFS is only as durable as the node that uploaded the content. There are no guarantees long term availability of content. So, IPFS is more of a CDN than a file system currently. It's a distributed content cache. There's an enormous long tail of files that are only available on 1 node, which is typically somebody's laptop. Another problem is that the block system does not combine well with e.g. s3 or similar file buckets on popular cloud providers. If you think of IPFS as a CDN then you basically have to worry about hosting files somewhere that is reliable and durable. IPFS does not solve that problem currently. So, you basically will either be self hosting some file servers or use something off the shelf, like S3. There's an S3 backend for IPFS but it's a bit unclear how well that performs. We've done some tests with it and the small blocksize is creating quite a bit of overhead for read and write HTTP requests. Access control or privacy protection are currently not really in scope of IPFS. I doubt this is a good tool for bypassing e.g. censor ship unless you are willing to expose yourself to explaining why your node is hosting certain content hashes. TOR and I2P probably provide better protection here. I2P actually runs a variant of bittorrent for file sharing. It's been a while since I looked at this but it used to be quite slow but reliable.

kdtsh 7y ago

I think one of the interesting use cases for IPFS is having a distributed build store for tools like Nix and Guix. It sounds to me like almost the perfect case for it: an immutable datastore of hashes of reproducible builds is well suited to distributed storage. Imagine being able to peek into a global store of build outputs and, for the hash of any given inputs, retrieve some corresponding output. It would be an incredibly unique experience. There’s a proof of concept of building IPFS into Guix’s store[1]. There’s also periodically discussion on the mailing list. I’m sure it’s much more complicated than I’m giving it credit for, and there would be security and social implications (someone’s going to be building most of the software, and what happens if you have low bandwidth or a small data plan?) Still, IPFS sounds like an interesting experiment in this area. [1] https://github.com/fps/guix-ipfs-cache https://github.com/fps/guix-ipfs-cache

fiatjaf 7y ago

I once fell for this talk about "content-addressing". You know what? Saying stuff is addressed by their content doesn't change the fact that the internet is "location-addressed" and you still have to know where peers that have the data you want are and connect to them. And what is the solution for that? A DHT! Turns out DHTs have terrible incentive structure and don't seem to be working well. Downloading content on IPFS is the _most slow experience ever_ and for some reason I don't understand downloading is even slower. Even if you are in the same LAN of another machine that has the content you need it will still take hours to download some small file you would do in seconds with `scp`. Now even if you know which peer has the content you want and tell IPFS to connect to it directly and the connection is established and the is being (slowly) downloaded... IPFS will drop the connection and the download will stop.

fulldecent2 7y ago

The long-term solution for web is: - Use more static HTML - Since your assets are versioned and static, start calculating hashes for everything you publish - When you link to something, include the URL and the integrity <a href="URL" integrity="sha256:...">...</a> In the immediate future this will fix broken links. Things that are important will be cached and accessible via content addressing. In the long-term future this will fix other problems like linking to a page and then it being changed to something you don't endorse.

thomas232233 7y ago

All the docs tells about to setup IPFS server. What is the intended way to browse ipfs sites(extensions , or new browser ) ?