4 ms·

Is any part of the library stored in the IPFS network?

traverseda 5y ago
IPFS seems to be mostly hype, it's never really worked for me when I've tried to store even relatively tame dataset. There's a reason it hasn't taken over the torrenting/piracy world and it's not because those people are slow to adopt new technology.
- pumanoir 5y ago
  I just learned about IPFS this week, it sounded really cool and was planning on learning more about it. But as my time is limited I'd wanna know if it's worth the time investment. Which parts of IPFS didn't work for you? Was it to slow? Missing features? No integrations? Or plain broken ridden with bugs?
  - kaba0 5y ago
    The first mirror on library genesis often has a link to an IPFS option, which is usually the fastest option. The “problem” with ipfs is that without incentivizing someone to pin (basically to seed) your file, it will be slower to access/will not necessarily remain alive if you yourself stop hosting it. But it’s the same with torrent. It’s actually really cool that it has public gateways so you don’t need anything specific for access.
  - pdimitar 5y ago
    It's not censorship-resistant. They have technical solutions in place to directly ban/blacklist certain content hashes which can get served to the servers directly by national security agencies. A dystopian heaven. IPFS had a really cool idea at the start but they quickly bent under legal pressure without even trying to fight back. They have lost all legitimacy in the circles of the people who want to distribute potentially sensitive data that's only deemed illegal by corporate interests (like scientific papers). --- And as the sibling poster alluded to, the network can be extremely slow. Even for well-known content hashes I often times had 5-10 minutes of preliminary phase where not a single byte was downloaded, only for finally start downloading 500MB at 20KB/s... And I have a gigabit connection.
    - cle 5y ago
      Do you have more info on this? What's the specific mechanism used here? And do you have any links about the legal issues?

IPFS seems to be mostly hype, it's never really worked for me when I've tried to store even relatively tame dataset. There's a reason it hasn't taken over the torrenting/piracy world and it's not because those people are slow to adopt new technology.

pumanoir 5y ago
I just learned about IPFS this week, it sounded really cool and was planning on learning more about it. But as my time is limited I'd wanna know if it's worth the time investment. Which parts of IPFS didn't work for you? Was it to slow? Missing features? No integrations? Or plain broken ridden with bugs?
- kaba0 5y ago
  The first mirror on library genesis often has a link to an IPFS option, which is usually the fastest option. The “problem” with ipfs is that without incentivizing someone to pin (basically to seed) your file, it will be slower to access/will not necessarily remain alive if you yourself stop hosting it. But it’s the same with torrent. It’s actually really cool that it has public gateways so you don’t need anything specific for access.
- pdimitar 5y ago
  It's not censorship-resistant. They have technical solutions in place to directly ban/blacklist certain content hashes which can get served to the servers directly by national security agencies. A dystopian heaven. IPFS had a really cool idea at the start but they quickly bent under legal pressure without even trying to fight back. They have lost all legitimacy in the circles of the people who want to distribute potentially sensitive data that's only deemed illegal by corporate interests (like scientific papers). --- And as the sibling poster alluded to, the network can be extremely slow. Even for well-known content hashes I often times had 5-10 minutes of preliminary phase where not a single byte was downloaded, only for finally start downloading 500MB at 20KB/s... And I have a gigabit connection.
  - cle 5y ago
    Do you have more info on this? What's the specific mechanism used here? And do you have any links about the legal issues?