4 ms·
> It's wild to see people who love the word "decentralized" also love it when an organization tries to centralize a something that's decentralized. I don't thi
by pimterry 5y ago
> It's wild to see people who love the word "decentralized" also love it when an organization tries to centralize a something that's decentralized.
I don't think that's a good description of what's happening here.
IPFS content accessible via Cloudflare's gateway isn't dependent on Cloudflare itself at all. They're just acting as another equal peer in the network (albeit a widespread & well-connected one). If Cloudflare disappears, the content remains.
It's exactly like a large organization providing extra seeds for a popular torrent - it doesn't take anything away from the rest of the network.
- jamescostian 5y agoCorrect me if I'm wrong but isn't it totally different from a large organization seeding a torrent, because everyone downloading data from them is also likely seeding the torrent too while downloading it, while anyone using the gateway is not also storing any info on their machines? Won't this gateway make it less likely to have some sort of p2p app take off, because why help out peers at your expense when you can get what you want from Cloudflare at no expense? Or maybe I'm looking at IPFS wrong - I interpret it as something meant to become popular (meaning much more non-programmers would use it than programmers), but I suppose if it remains a small community like torrenting, then it could remain effectively decentralized despite Cloudflare's gateway, because of how many users are being peers instead of solely leaching