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I'm very glad Kiwi Farms is gone. But as a thought experiment, would an IPFS based distributed website survive attacks of this nature? It could be pinned by i

I'm very glad Kiwi Farms is gone. But as a thought experiment, would an IPFS based distributed website survive attacks of this nature? It could be pinned by individual users and gateways and accessed using browser plug-ins. [1] https://ipfs.tech/ https://ipfs.tech/

prvit 4y ago
Sure, it could. Good luck building a decent forum on IPFS though.
tsujamin 4y ago
I'd be interested to know if the users of the site would be brave and willing enough to pin Kiwi Farm's content to their attributable/personally owned devices... Surely some of the appeal or enablers for the behaviour on there is that someone else is wearing the legal risk of storing it all
- ragebol 4y ago
  There are pinning services, that do the pinning for a fee. But Those can also be DDosed I suppose. Can have multiple pinners of course but, but I doubt that makes a difference in the longer term.
  - polygamous_bat 4y ago
    And of course the pinning services can drop them just like cloudflare and DDOS-guard did.
- TazeTSchnitzel 4y ago
  I think this is the big flaw of systems like IPFS and BitTorrent. “If you pin it, it will stay online” is all well and good, but if it's a legal risk to keep the content online, you're putting a target on your head. Now, you could make everything encrypted and anonymised, but now you're Freenet (is that what it's called?) and the risk you're hosting e.g. CSAM means nobody wants anything to do with you no matter what you have pinned.
viraptor 4y ago
I theory yes, but ipfs covers the distribution and publishing, not the editing. There would still have to be some stateful service for account management, posting, etc. that would suffer the same issues as the current service. On top of that, access at two biggest gateways would likely be filtered since one is a hobbyist service and the other is cloudflare, so everyone would have to run their own nodes. So in practice - no. Only an archive of the current state.
dale_glass 4y ago
I don't think a forum is possible on IPFS? To my knowledge, it's content addressable, and therefore limited to static content, because if the content of a file change, the URL to it changes.
- cfcosta 4y ago
  You can keep the assets/media to IPFS and use a small server to host everything else? With proper archival, seems doable in a scalable way.
  - dale_glass 4y ago
    But that server has to be on the open internet, and can be trivially attacked.
r721 4y ago
I wonder whether "botnet hosting" will become a thing over time. I mean one could buy "malware installs", so theoretically one could buy "decentralized storage app installs" as well, something like Sia/Filecoin/Storj.
- i5heu 4y ago
  Filecoin/Storj are build strongly on reputation. A new node will not get data or important stuff. filecoin needs very very good hardware.
  - r721 4y ago
    Maybe a fork with some tweaks which is built specifically for this task will work? Anyway this is just an idea which I didn't see discussed anywhere.

prvit 4y ago

Sure, it could. Good luck building a decent forum on IPFS though.

tsujamin 4y ago

I'd be interested to know if the users of the site would be brave and willing enough to pin Kiwi Farm's content to their attributable/personally owned devices... Surely some of the appeal or enablers for the behaviour on there is that someone else is wearing the legal risk of storing it all

ragebol 4y ago
There are pinning services, that do the pinning for a fee. But Those can also be DDosed I suppose. Can have multiple pinners of course but, but I doubt that makes a difference in the longer term.
- polygamous_bat 4y ago
  And of course the pinning services can drop them just like cloudflare and DDOS-guard did.
TazeTSchnitzel 4y ago
I think this is the big flaw of systems like IPFS and BitTorrent. “If you pin it, it will stay online” is all well and good, but if it's a legal risk to keep the content online, you're putting a target on your head. Now, you could make everything encrypted and anonymised, but now you're Freenet (is that what it's called?) and the risk you're hosting e.g. CSAM means nobody wants anything to do with you no matter what you have pinned.

viraptor 4y ago

I theory yes, but ipfs covers the distribution and publishing, not the editing. There would still have to be some stateful service for account management, posting, etc. that would suffer the same issues as the current service. On top of that, access at two biggest gateways would likely be filtered since one is a hobbyist service and the other is cloudflare, so everyone would have to run their own nodes. So in practice - no. Only an archive of the current state.

dale_glass 4y ago

I don't think a forum is possible on IPFS? To my knowledge, it's content addressable, and therefore limited to static content, because if the content of a file change, the URL to it changes.

cfcosta 4y ago
You can keep the assets/media to IPFS and use a small server to host everything else? With proper archival, seems doable in a scalable way.
- dale_glass 4y ago
  But that server has to be on the open internet, and can be trivially attacked.

r721 4y ago

I wonder whether "botnet hosting" will become a thing over time. I mean one could buy "malware installs", so theoretically one could buy "decentralized storage app installs" as well, something like Sia/Filecoin/Storj.

i5heu 4y ago
Filecoin/Storj are build strongly on reputation. A new node will not get data or important stuff. filecoin needs very very good hardware.
- r721 4y ago
  Maybe a fork with some tweaks which is built specifically for this task will work? Anyway this is just an idea which I didn't see discussed anywhere.