6 ms·

i love p2p and torrents but ipfs really looks like a solution looking for a problem. i still havent seen a user friendly implementation of it usable by the mass

i love p2p and torrents but ipfs really looks like a solution looking for a problem. i still havent seen a user friendly implementation of it usable by the masses. (yes if you know some feel free to comment it, of course id love to check it out)

zolland 4y ago
I believe LibGen uses IPFS as it's backend
- aabhay 4y ago
  No I believe someone has ported the library to IPFS but it’s not reliant on it in any way.
- IceWreck 4y ago
  It doesn't, thats just a mirror and even then everyone just uses the cloudflare or ipfs.io gateway instead of actually using IPFS. Dont get me wrong I like IPFS and would love to see increased usage but if a libgen mirror is the biggest example then we need to find more applications for it.
  - trasz 4y ago
    Let’s make a libgen for music. And run it all on IPFS.
    - shp0ngle 4y ago
      You will start running into exactly the same problem as with normal hosting. You need someone to “pin” the music for you, or you pin it yourself but with public IP and will get sued. Unlike with torrents, most people will be using the “gateways” - most people are not “seeding” - partly because IPFS itself is resource hungry and hard to use, unlike Torrent which is easy to use. In reality IPFS world is very centralized, you just have this resource hungry pretend-decentralisation on top. I don’t know why is it like that when BitTorrent is much older and much more actually decentralised.
      - trasz 4y ago
        Avoiding the legal problems seems doable, Sci-Hub and LibGen are managing. But the gateways thing sounds... unfortunate. The way BitTorrent fixed this was the ratio - if you weren't seeding enough, you'd eventually get kicked out from the tracker. Does IPFS have a similar mechanism, or something else but with the same purpose?
  - zolland 4y ago
    What do you mean by ipfs.io gateway instead of ipfs? I'm not super familiar with this stuff.
rklaehn 4y ago
In recent years there has been a large growth of alternative IPFS implementations. Partly because of different needs, partly because of unhappiness with the performance and reliability of the go-ipfs implementation. At my previous company actyx.com we wrote our own ipfs implementation in rust called ipfs-embed ( https://github.com/ipfs-rust/ipfs-embed https://github.com/ipfs-rust/ipfs-embed ) that serves as the storage for our distributed event sourcing system. It is used in production and is reliable. The user of an Actyx deployment will not notice in any way that they are using ipfs in the background. There are also some other interesting developments involving ipfs and rust. See a list of implementations here: https://docs.ipfs.tech/basics/ipfs-implementations/ https://docs.ipfs.tech/basics/ipfs-implementations/
- _hl_ 4y ago
  Wow, is there a tech blog where we can read more about the design and why it was made that way? Sounds absolutely fascinating!
  - rklaehn 4y ago
    I will talk about it at IPFS camp 2022. I hope it will be recorded. Here is my talk about actyx from IPFS camp 2019: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qzu0xtCT-R0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qzu0xtCT-R0 . It does not go into much technical details, and it does not describe the current architecture but a previous iteration though.
- stavros 4y ago
  This isn't compatible with go-ipfs, right? I can't run this as a node and connect to IPFS the network?
  - rklaehn 4y ago
    ipfs-embed is using rust-libp2p and official protocols like gossipsub. So for that it is fully compatible with the ipfs network. At least as compatible as you can get when the specs are sometimes vague. Bitswap has a compat mode, but when two ipfs-embed versions talk to each other they use a different protocol. Note that ipfs-embed is made for a different use case than the global ipfs. It is typically used by private swarms where there are a smaller number of nodes. So e.g. we don't use the DHT at all. We also found that go-ipfs compat is not that useful for our use case, so the compat layer was mainly done as a service to the community and might not work with the latest go-ipfs / kubo.
guessbest 4y ago
It is usable on WinWorld. Here's a link to a download so you can test it yourself if you like Windows 3.1 version 3.01.068 beta from 2-3-1992 on 5.25-1.2mb disk images. https://winworldpc.com/download/7f8040e5-d206-11e7-a73f-fa163e9022f0 https://winworldpc.com/download/7f8040e5-d206-11e7-a73f-fa16...
e12e 4y ago
I'm not a great fan of cloudflare - but they do some interesting work in bringing ipfs into the "normal" cloud-style static site/"pages"-hosting - either letting users expose cf pages via ipfs: https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-pages-on-ipfs/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-pages-on-ipfs/ Unfortunately, as far as I understand, they closed down the open ipfs gateway [b] [p] - it's now up to "users" to pay for bandwidth exposed via ipfs on the web: https://blog.cloudflare.com/ea-web3-gateways/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/ea-web3-gateways/ [b] https://blog.cloudflare.com/distributed-web-gateway/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/distributed-web-gateway/ [p] https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/

zolland 4y ago

I believe LibGen uses IPFS as it's backend

aabhay 4y ago
No I believe someone has ported the library to IPFS but it’s not reliant on it in any way.
IceWreck 4y ago
It doesn't, thats just a mirror and even then everyone just uses the cloudflare or ipfs.io gateway instead of actually using IPFS. Dont get me wrong I like IPFS and would love to see increased usage but if a libgen mirror is the biggest example then we need to find more applications for it.
- trasz 4y ago
  Let’s make a libgen for music. And run it all on IPFS.
  - shp0ngle 4y ago
    You will start running into exactly the same problem as with normal hosting. You need someone to “pin” the music for you, or you pin it yourself but with public IP and will get sued. Unlike with torrents, most people will be using the “gateways” - most people are not “seeding” - partly because IPFS itself is resource hungry and hard to use, unlike Torrent which is easy to use. In reality IPFS world is very centralized, you just have this resource hungry pretend-decentralisation on top. I don’t know why is it like that when BitTorrent is much older and much more actually decentralised.
    - trasz 4y ago
      Avoiding the legal problems seems doable, Sci-Hub and LibGen are managing. But the gateways thing sounds... unfortunate. The way BitTorrent fixed this was the ratio - if you weren't seeding enough, you'd eventually get kicked out from the tracker. Does IPFS have a similar mechanism, or something else but with the same purpose?
- zolland 4y ago
  What do you mean by ipfs.io gateway instead of ipfs? I'm not super familiar with this stuff.

rklaehn 4y ago

In recent years there has been a large growth of alternative IPFS implementations. Partly because of different needs, partly because of unhappiness with the performance and reliability of the go-ipfs implementation. At my previous company actyx.com we wrote our own ipfs implementation in rust called ipfs-embed ( https://github.com/ipfs-rust/ipfs-embed https://github.com/ipfs-rust/ipfs-embed ) that serves as the storage for our distributed event sourcing system. It is used in production and is reliable. The user of an Actyx deployment will not notice in any way that they are using ipfs in the background. There are also some other interesting developments involving ipfs and rust. See a list of implementations here: https://docs.ipfs.tech/basics/ipfs-implementations/ https://docs.ipfs.tech/basics/ipfs-implementations/

_hl_ 4y ago
Wow, is there a tech blog where we can read more about the design and why it was made that way? Sounds absolutely fascinating!
- rklaehn 4y ago
  I will talk about it at IPFS camp 2022. I hope it will be recorded. Here is my talk about actyx from IPFS camp 2019: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qzu0xtCT-R0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qzu0xtCT-R0 . It does not go into much technical details, and it does not describe the current architecture but a previous iteration though.
stavros 4y ago
This isn't compatible with go-ipfs, right? I can't run this as a node and connect to IPFS the network?
- rklaehn 4y ago
  ipfs-embed is using rust-libp2p and official protocols like gossipsub. So for that it is fully compatible with the ipfs network. At least as compatible as you can get when the specs are sometimes vague. Bitswap has a compat mode, but when two ipfs-embed versions talk to each other they use a different protocol. Note that ipfs-embed is made for a different use case than the global ipfs. It is typically used by private swarms where there are a smaller number of nodes. So e.g. we don't use the DHT at all. We also found that go-ipfs compat is not that useful for our use case, so the compat layer was mainly done as a service to the community and might not work with the latest go-ipfs / kubo.

guessbest 4y ago

It is usable on WinWorld. Here's a link to a download so you can test it yourself if you like Windows 3.1 version 3.01.068 beta from 2-3-1992 on 5.25-1.2mb disk images. https://winworldpc.com/download/7f8040e5-d206-11e7-a73f-fa163e9022f0 https://winworldpc.com/download/7f8040e5-d206-11e7-a73f-fa16...

e12e 4y ago

I'm not a great fan of cloudflare - but they do some interesting work in bringing ipfs into the "normal" cloud-style static site/"pages"-hosting - either letting users expose cf pages via ipfs: https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-pages-on-ipfs/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-pages-on-ipfs/ Unfortunately, as far as I understand, they closed down the open ipfs gateway [b] [p] - it's now up to "users" to pay for bandwidth exposed via ipfs on the web: https://blog.cloudflare.com/ea-web3-gateways/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/ea-web3-gateways/ [b] https://blog.cloudflare.com/distributed-web-gateway/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/distributed-web-gateway/ [p] https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/