6 ms·

IPFS Powers the Distributed Web

65 points by heyuji78 5y ago

x14km2d 5y ago
I had tried the project two years ago, but after a few days I had too many unauthorized accesses, because the project was still in the early stages. Has anyone had some experience in the meantime or is this still an "insider" project?
- danielEM 5y ago
  Personally didn't like that there was no option for setting any transfer limits, using it with limited mobile plan is like "internet suiccide"
- yawnxyz 5y ago
  none of the examples on the homepage work, so I'm assuming it's still wonky
- ilaksh 5y ago
  What do you mean unauthorized accesses? IPFS is heavily used for NFTs.
  - jazzyjackson 5y ago
    Which, unfortunately, is full of folks who don’t understand that the image disappears when no ones hosting it. People call the IPFS the “perma-web” and expect their content to be hosted in perpetuity for free. Imaging paying for artwork and not downloading a copy because you think it’s archived. Poor art buyers.
    - nicbou 5y ago
      So it's like torrents when they have no seeders?
      - Zetaphor 5y ago
        Yes, same basic idea. IPFS requires at least one client to be "pinning" the content. Pinata seems to be the preferred choice for NFT's, creating a significant weak point in the ecosystem.
        mattdesl 5y ago
        The preferred choice is just to pin your content directly, here’s an example with Hicetnunc: https://gist.github.com/mattdesl/47f4ea12ea131eed8401bdacf95a1f47 https://gist.github.com/mattdesl/47f4ea12ea131eed8401bdacf95...
    - hinkley 5y ago
      Magical thinking by people who ridicule others for magical thinking. What a piece of work is man...
annadane 5y ago
See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10187555 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10187555
Proven 5y ago
The Web has always been distributed. Ever hear of Web proxy cache? Squid existed in the 90s. Ever wonder how Linux distros have had so HTTP(S) mirrors before IPFS? Copy the content with wget and now it's distributed. There's like 50 people who use IPFS.
jazzyjackson 5y ago
I never understood the difference between ipfs hash addresses and a magnet link hash address. I guess the magnet link still has to ask a tracking server that knows some peer addresses already right? Whereas an ipfs node can dive into the DHT and start searching for a peer?
- vertere 5y ago
  Bittorrent also has a DHT, which you can use instead of (or as well as) tracking servers. Perhaps the key difference is that torrents (targets for magnet links) can't link to other torrents, at least not in a way the protocol is aware of. Each torrent swarm is something of an island. IPFS is more like one big graph ("web") of documents/files.
  - brendyn 5y ago
    bittorrent v2 is a bit different and more similar to IPFS: https://blog.libtorrent.org/2020/09/bittorrent-v2/ https://blog.libtorrent.org/2020/09/bittorrent-v2/
    - vertere 5y ago
      I'm not super familiar with v2 but from what I have read it's not clear how it achieves the same thing as IPFS. Yes, the file-hashing is deterministic, which can allow deduplication across torrents, but it doesn't seem to facilitate either discovery or addressing at the file level. Trackers/DHT and magnet links still only use the info hash (torrent level) as far as I can tell. IPFS puts file/object hashes in the DHT so they are directly discoverable, meaning people coming to the same object from different from different places can find one another. It also allows one object to be explicitly addressed via an ancestor object's hash (<hash>/path/to/object), which has various benefits.
      - Avamander 5y ago
        > which has various benefits. But also the downside of being incompatible with the BitTorrent network and it's myriad of seeders and torrents. I think quite a few P2P projects have thrown out compatibility for the sake of some functionality but also the entire baby. PeerTube did the same, disabled WebTorrent support by-default before any BitTorrent clients got WT support. The desire to "move fast" makes people forget what actually makes a system usable and how decades of inertia changes how changes can be made. Impatience.

65 points by heyuji78 5y ago

I had tried the project two years ago, but after a few days I had too many unauthorized accesses, because the project was still in the early stages. Has anyone had some experience in the meantime or is this still an "insider" project?

danielEM 5y ago
Personally didn't like that there was no option for setting any transfer limits, using it with limited mobile plan is like "internet suiccide"
yawnxyz 5y ago
none of the examples on the homepage work, so I'm assuming it's still wonky
ilaksh 5y ago
What do you mean unauthorized accesses? IPFS is heavily used for NFTs.
- jazzyjackson 5y ago
  Which, unfortunately, is full of folks who don’t understand that the image disappears when no ones hosting it. People call the IPFS the “perma-web” and expect their content to be hosted in perpetuity for free. Imaging paying for artwork and not downloading a copy because you think it’s archived. Poor art buyers.
  - nicbou 5y ago
    So it's like torrents when they have no seeders?
    - Zetaphor 5y ago
      Yes, same basic idea. IPFS requires at least one client to be "pinning" the content. Pinata seems to be the preferred choice for NFT's, creating a significant weak point in the ecosystem.
      - mattdesl 5y ago
        The preferred choice is just to pin your content directly, here’s an example with Hicetnunc: https://gist.github.com/mattdesl/47f4ea12ea131eed8401bdacf95a1f47 https://gist.github.com/mattdesl/47f4ea12ea131eed8401bdacf95...
  - hinkley 5y ago
    Magical thinking by people who ridicule others for magical thinking. What a piece of work is man...

annadane 5y ago

See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10187555 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10187555

Proven 5y ago

The Web has always been distributed. Ever hear of Web proxy cache? Squid existed in the 90s. Ever wonder how Linux distros have had so HTTP(S) mirrors before IPFS? Copy the content with wget and now it's distributed. There's like 50 people who use IPFS.

jazzyjackson 5y ago

I never understood the difference between ipfs hash addresses and a magnet link hash address. I guess the magnet link still has to ask a tracking server that knows some peer addresses already right? Whereas an ipfs node can dive into the DHT and start searching for a peer?

vertere 5y ago
Bittorrent also has a DHT, which you can use instead of (or as well as) tracking servers. Perhaps the key difference is that torrents (targets for magnet links) can't link to other torrents, at least not in a way the protocol is aware of. Each torrent swarm is something of an island. IPFS is more like one big graph ("web") of documents/files.
- brendyn 5y ago
  bittorrent v2 is a bit different and more similar to IPFS: https://blog.libtorrent.org/2020/09/bittorrent-v2/ https://blog.libtorrent.org/2020/09/bittorrent-v2/
  - vertere 5y ago
    I'm not super familiar with v2 but from what I have read it's not clear how it achieves the same thing as IPFS. Yes, the file-hashing is deterministic, which can allow deduplication across torrents, but it doesn't seem to facilitate either discovery or addressing at the file level. Trackers/DHT and magnet links still only use the info hash (torrent level) as far as I can tell. IPFS puts file/object hashes in the DHT so they are directly discoverable, meaning people coming to the same object from different from different places can find one another. It also allows one object to be explicitly addressed via an ancestor object's hash (<hash>/path/to/object), which has various benefits.
    - Avamander 5y ago
      > which has various benefits. But also the downside of being incompatible with the BitTorrent network and it's myriad of seeders and torrents. I think quite a few P2P projects have thrown out compatibility for the sake of some functionality but also the entire baby. PeerTube did the same, disabled WebTorrent support by-default before any BitTorrent clients got WT support. The desire to "move fast" makes people forget what actually makes a system usable and how decades of inertia changes how changes can be made. Impatience.