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This is one of the things that excites me about IPFS: in a world of decentralized data storage, yes self-hosting and control over your data is nice and all, but

This is one of the things that excites me about IPFS: in a world of decentralized data storage, yes self-hosting and control over your data is nice and all, but serious resilience to most random infrastructure outages is a much bigger deal. It's still early days, but I'm hopeful that it can provide a real solution to today's CDN centralization.

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jfny 5y ago
I'm pretty sure you can serve hundreds if not thousands of users from a single Raspberry Pi
- pimterry 5y ago
  I mean, yes, absolutely, and that works to start with, but I'm willing to bet the overall uptime and performance of a raspberry pi in your living room is quite a bit worse that Fastly's :-).
jokoon 5y ago
Agree, but currently, ipfs would serve as a fallback, since it's about files. Decentralized/distributed generally has slower network performance. Unless most nodes are high performance, I guess? Personally I think a distributed database system, where entries are being made redundant in something like a blockchain+dht, would be a good start? Decentralizing the internet works if it financially makes sense for platforms to build such tools.
- pimterry 5y ago
  > Agree, but currently, ipfs would serve as a fallback, since it's about files. Isn't a CDN fundamentally all about files too? > Decentralized/distributed generally has slower network performance. Unless most nodes are high performance, I guess? There is definitely more work to do here before this is really useful, but it's well within the realm of things that IPFS should be able to do at reasonable performance for production sites in future. Good performance still requires a serious CDN node network similar to traditional CDNs today (to seed your content for day to day use) but with IPFS if that CDN goes down then existing users on your site can _also_ serve the site to other nearby users directly, or other CDNs can serve your site too, etc etc. Your DNS wouldn't be linked to any specific CDN in any way, just to the hash of the content itself, so anybody could serve it. > Decentralizing the internet works if it financially makes sense for platforms to build such tools. There's a platform company called Fleek who already do this today: https://fleek.co/hosting/ https://fleek.co/hosting/ (no affiliation, and I've never even used the product, just looks cool). Seems to be designed as a Netlify competitor: push code with git and it builds it into static content and then deploys to IPFS. The benefits don't exist today of course, because no browsers natively support IPFS, so most users can only access the content via an IPFS gateway, which means you're back to fully centralized server infrastructure again... If we can get IPFS support into browsers though then fully decentralized CDN infrastructure for the web is totally possible.

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jfny 5y ago

I'm pretty sure you can serve hundreds if not thousands of users from a single Raspberry Pi

pimterry 5y ago
I mean, yes, absolutely, and that works to start with, but I'm willing to bet the overall uptime and performance of a raspberry pi in your living room is quite a bit worse that Fastly's :-).

jokoon 5y ago

Agree, but currently, ipfs would serve as a fallback, since it's about files. Decentralized/distributed generally has slower network performance. Unless most nodes are high performance, I guess? Personally I think a distributed database system, where entries are being made redundant in something like a blockchain+dht, would be a good start? Decentralizing the internet works if it financially makes sense for platforms to build such tools.

pimterry 5y ago
> Agree, but currently, ipfs would serve as a fallback, since it's about files. Isn't a CDN fundamentally all about files too? > Decentralized/distributed generally has slower network performance. Unless most nodes are high performance, I guess? There is definitely more work to do here before this is really useful, but it's well within the realm of things that IPFS should be able to do at reasonable performance for production sites in future. Good performance still requires a serious CDN node network similar to traditional CDNs today (to seed your content for day to day use) but with IPFS if that CDN goes down then existing users on your site can _also_ serve the site to other nearby users directly, or other CDNs can serve your site too, etc etc. Your DNS wouldn't be linked to any specific CDN in any way, just to the hash of the content itself, so anybody could serve it. > Decentralizing the internet works if it financially makes sense for platforms to build such tools. There's a platform company called Fleek who already do this today: https://fleek.co/hosting/ https://fleek.co/hosting/ (no affiliation, and I've never even used the product, just looks cool). Seems to be designed as a Netlify competitor: push code with git and it builds it into static content and then deploys to IPFS. The benefits don't exist today of course, because no browsers natively support IPFS, so most users can only access the content via an IPFS gateway, which means you're back to fully centralized server infrastructure again... If we can get IPFS support into browsers though then fully decentralized CDN infrastructure for the web is totally possible.