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xoa is kind of correct in describing IPFS as a giant CDN but there's a key difference here between IPFS and "IPFS gateways". IPFS gateways don't host any files
by 22c 3y ago
xoa is kind of correct in describing IPFS as a giant CDN but there's a key difference here between IPFS and "IPFS gateways".
IPFS gateways don't host any files, they act in the exact way that xoas comment talks about.
> They don't host content, they don't discriminate, they just route traffic.
Indeed an IPFS gateway does not "host" content either, it merely shifts bits around in the same way a proxy or VPN shifts bits around. It's not correct to say that when you're connected to a VPN that your VPN provider is hosting Google or Netflix, it's the exact same with IPFS gateways.
The only difference between IPFS gateways and a proxy in that sense is that a proxy serves the client HTTP content from a HTTP source whereas an IPFS gateway serves HTTP content from an IPFS source.
Equivalently imagine a proxy that could proxy traffic from any publicly accessible FTP server to HTTP. Is it correct to say that the proxy is hosting the content that resides on the FTP? No, it's not. The FTP server is hosting the content and the proxy is piping it to clients from FTP->HTTP without storing anything.
- TeMPOraL 3y agoI think the difference is that FTP is historically known and easy to use with generic tooling. Or at least it was so a decade ago. Today, in fact, I bet that if you made a website that's fronting someone else's FTP server, it's you who'd get hit with DMCA first. IPFS is public only for a small subset of techies - at this point, for anyone else, it's some mystery alternate realm they don't have access to. This is not a theoretical issue, but a purely pragmatic one - but legal action is also mostly taken on practical grounds, not theoretical. Thus, obscurity of the tech involved matters.