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While I think IPFS is a great technology, it really isn't "easy". It still has a long way to go in that regard. Probably what's holding it back the most, in my

While I think IPFS is a great technology, it really isn't "easy". It still has a long way to go in that regard. Probably what's holding it back the most, in my case, is that it doesn't have FUSE or it's own proper file browser. Things like torrents are easy: download a client, download a torrent, double-click on it and you're nearly there. IPFS? Download this, go to "http://localhost:3000 http://localhost:3000" (or whatever the port is), find a hash somewhere (where and how?), copy the hash to the browser, browse it, maybe download a certain file from the listing, err... how do I download a directory? As for DNSlink, nothing official exists (at least to my knowledge) that can automate updating the DNS entry. You have to cobble something together yourself, tailor it to your registrar, put it in a cron, systemd service or whatever, yadda yadda yadda. They are probably doing a lot of work and IPFS is already useful, but if it isn't easy to use, it'll stay niche.

stavros 5y ago
I've never had many good experiences with IPFS (and I've created a lot of stuff for it, including a pinning service). It frequently fails to find content on the DHT, it's very slow, a resource hog, my ticket for improving the pinning interface has stagnated for years, and Juan Benet once called me a Karen on Twitter for complaining about a regression that broke IPNS pinning. I love the theoretical idea, but the execution? I wish them luck, but it's useless to me.
- jonathanstrange 5y ago
  I haven't tried IPFS so far but can second this sentiment somewhat for my experience using go-libp2p. It's not only surprisingly limited in certain respects and unusually complicated to use, the forums for it are the most unhelpful I've ever encountered. Reasonable questions remain completely unanswered, or it takes two weeks for someone to reply with an unhelpful answer (usually along the lines "I don't know either"). My impression is that the active contributors do not want people to use go-libp2p in their own projects.
- thomashop 5y ago
  I'm using IPFS to host generative media for https://pollinations.ai https://pollinations.ai and it has been quite stable and fun to use. I think it has been getting a lot better in recent months.
  - stavros 5y ago
    I hope so, I haven't used it much recently, maybe it did improve. Do you expose your CIDs so we can visit on IPFS?
    - thomashop 5y ago
      The results are automatically tweeted at the moment: https://twitter.com/pollinations_ai https://twitter.com/pollinations_ai You can get the CID by following the URL and then clicking on "ContentID"
grumbel 5y ago
Brave has IPFS support build-in and with every other browser you can still access it by using a public gateway, without installing anything. Even if you want the "full experience", it's quite easy as the go-ipfs daemon comes a single precompiled binary without any weird dependencies or a need to configure anything. Also IPFS has a FUSE daemon included (--mount option), so it shows up as /ipfs and /ipns on Linux. The bigger issue is that there is no way to browse IPFS. So even when you have IPFS up and running, there isn't anything obvious to do with it. ipfs-search.com is about as good as it gets, but that's mostly broken links and due to the lack of a way to navigate to the parent directory, you are often left with individual files as search result, not actual webpages. Also the FUSE daemon is barely usable. Due to the way IPFS works at the moment, it can't show you a directory until it has downloaded the blocks for all the files in that directory, as that's the only way to get the file type. This makes it painfully slow to use and basically impossible for larger directories, e.g. having a Linux distribution mirrored on IPFS could be cool, but was completely unusable last time I tried. There is a lot of potential in IPFS, but to really shine it needs a lot more work put into it. Once it can mirror Github and I can `cd /ipfs/...` into a git repository, it could be really useful (IPLD should allow that eventually), but so far it barely works well enough to replace an FTP server. Another elephant in the room is copyright. IPFS only cares about hashes, it doesn't track who owns or uploaded the content. It's like running a torrent for every bit of Internet you browse. I can't see that working out in the long run in today's legal landscape.
cle 5y ago
> Probably what's holding it back the most, in my case, is that it doesn't have FUSE or it's own proper file browser. It does have FUSE: https://github.com/ipfs/go-ipfs/blob/master/docs/fuse.md https://github.com/ipfs/go-ipfs/blob/master/docs/fuse.md For hosting websites, there are quite a few platforms out there that automate the whole deployment lifecycle (including DNSLink), a popular one is Fleek https://fleek.co/hosting/ https://fleek.co/hosting/.
karmanyaahm 5y ago
> As for DNSlink, nothing official exists (at least to my knowledge) that can automate updating the DNS entry. You have to cobble something together Yup, that's what I had to do. Which is also why I've shared my scripts in the post to help others trying to achieve this. It's stil 'cobbled together' (ie no good error handling and stuff) as you said, but (for my blog) it's simple enough to just add the one line to the compile script (Makefile). (Author here)

stavros 5y ago

I've never had many good experiences with IPFS (and I've created a lot of stuff for it, including a pinning service). It frequently fails to find content on the DHT, it's very slow, a resource hog, my ticket for improving the pinning interface has stagnated for years, and Juan Benet once called me a Karen on Twitter for complaining about a regression that broke IPNS pinning. I love the theoretical idea, but the execution? I wish them luck, but it's useless to me.

jonathanstrange 5y ago
I haven't tried IPFS so far but can second this sentiment somewhat for my experience using go-libp2p. It's not only surprisingly limited in certain respects and unusually complicated to use, the forums for it are the most unhelpful I've ever encountered. Reasonable questions remain completely unanswered, or it takes two weeks for someone to reply with an unhelpful answer (usually along the lines "I don't know either"). My impression is that the active contributors do not want people to use go-libp2p in their own projects.
thomashop 5y ago
I'm using IPFS to host generative media for https://pollinations.ai https://pollinations.ai and it has been quite stable and fun to use. I think it has been getting a lot better in recent months.
- stavros 5y ago
  I hope so, I haven't used it much recently, maybe it did improve. Do you expose your CIDs so we can visit on IPFS?
  - thomashop 5y ago
    The results are automatically tweeted at the moment: https://twitter.com/pollinations_ai https://twitter.com/pollinations_ai You can get the CID by following the URL and then clicking on "ContentID"

grumbel 5y ago

Brave has IPFS support build-in and with every other browser you can still access it by using a public gateway, without installing anything. Even if you want the "full experience", it's quite easy as the go-ipfs daemon comes a single precompiled binary without any weird dependencies or a need to configure anything. Also IPFS has a FUSE daemon included (--mount option), so it shows up as /ipfs and /ipns on Linux. The bigger issue is that there is no way to browse IPFS. So even when you have IPFS up and running, there isn't anything obvious to do with it. ipfs-search.com is about as good as it gets, but that's mostly broken links and due to the lack of a way to navigate to the parent directory, you are often left with individual files as search result, not actual webpages. Also the FUSE daemon is barely usable. Due to the way IPFS works at the moment, it can't show you a directory until it has downloaded the blocks for all the files in that directory, as that's the only way to get the file type. This makes it painfully slow to use and basically impossible for larger directories, e.g. having a Linux distribution mirrored on IPFS could be cool, but was completely unusable last time I tried. There is a lot of potential in IPFS, but to really shine it needs a lot more work put into it. Once it can mirror Github and I can `cd /ipfs/...` into a git repository, it could be really useful (IPLD should allow that eventually), but so far it barely works well enough to replace an FTP server. Another elephant in the room is copyright. IPFS only cares about hashes, it doesn't track who owns or uploaded the content. It's like running a torrent for every bit of Internet you browse. I can't see that working out in the long run in today's legal landscape.

cle 5y ago

> Probably what's holding it back the most, in my case, is that it doesn't have FUSE or it's own proper file browser. It does have FUSE: https://github.com/ipfs/go-ipfs/blob/master/docs/fuse.md https://github.com/ipfs/go-ipfs/blob/master/docs/fuse.md For hosting websites, there are quite a few platforms out there that automate the whole deployment lifecycle (including DNSLink), a popular one is Fleek https://fleek.co/hosting/ https://fleek.co/hosting/.

karmanyaahm 5y ago

> As for DNSlink, nothing official exists (at least to my knowledge) that can automate updating the DNS entry. You have to cobble something together Yup, that's what I had to do. Which is also why I've shared my scripts in the post to help others trying to achieve this. It's stil 'cobbled together' (ie no good error handling and stuff) as you said, but (for my blog) it's simple enough to just add the one line to the compile script (Makefile). (Author here)