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Can it be solved with IPFS-based trackers?

• imtringued 6y ago
  Unfortunately search is something that is extremely efficient when centralized but very inefficient when distributed. A few years ago I was very interested in IPFS but once I learned about the limitations it was pretty much not suitable for me. If you really insist on using IPFS then your best bet would be to have a central tracker host an IPNS based site and publish its database index as a series of json files. The javascript client will then have to query the index on its own in the browser. The alternative would be to download the entire database and create a local index. In theory that's not a bad idea but over time your database will grow to several gigabytes. That's not comparable to just going to whatever site exist today and submitting a search term but it could be highly resilient. The fundamental problem is that untrusted nodes can't provide search services. It's possible that they end up redirecting you to a fake listing. Blockchain style consensus doesn't work for something that requires responses immediately like a search engine. Also bittorrent trackers are slightly more complicated than just a file store
• mratsim 6y ago
  IPFS has an incentivization problem just like torrents. The main reward for torrent uploaders is fame, would that translate well in IPFS?
  • imtringued 6y ago
    Popularity is usually only relevant for individual files but if you have an entire website hosted on IPFS that is very popular then it is quite likely that some people are pinning it. Last time I used IPFS it just didn't have the necessary user friendliness though. Pinning felt more like an afterthought but this was years ago so they may have changed things.