11 ms·

Amino – The Public IPFS DHT Is Getting a Facelift

134 points by dennis-tra 3y ago

mtillman 3y ago
I clicked About and received a 500 Error “Importing a module script failed”.
- pierat 3y ago
  Ah, so you pulled it from IPFS. That's the usual experience.
guntherhermann 3y ago
> The “Public IPFS DHT” is henceforth going to be called “Amino”. This follows along with the trend from 2022 in the IPFS ecosystem to use more precise language to create space for alternative options I'd argue that "Public IPFS DHT", if less catchy, is far more precise than "Amino".
- bembo 3y ago
  I think the point is that amino is just one public ipfs dht, so they renamed it, so that other public ipfs dhts can exist without confusion.
- Retr0id 3y ago
  It's less precise because there are many ways one could implement a "Public IPFS DHT". "Public IPFS DHT" is a concept, Amino is a concrete instantiation of that concept.
- diggan 3y ago
  As the quoted part mentions, if they'd call it "The Public IPFS DHT", there isn't really any room for someone else to create something that could replace it, because There Could Be Only One. With a specific name for the specific implementation of a general concept, others could provide alternative implementations implementing the same concept.
  - cjrp 3y ago
    Call it "The Public IPFS DHT v1.0" then ;)
    - ethbr1 3y ago
      Because that wouldn't be confusing if a novel implementation named itself "The Public IPFS DHT v2.0"? Specificity >> descriptiveness, when you're aiming for a distributed future with multiple parties As much as I hate AWS' jungle of names, I get why they did it. And it's probably better than any alternative
  - somat 3y ago
    I am probably missing something then, but as far as I can tell most of the value proposition of ipfs is the single universal dht. if you remove or fragment it now all you have is basically a worse bittorrent. Most of the interesting things I want to do with ipfs involve the dht, any sort of file transfer is usually a secondary concern.
    - diggan 3y ago
      > I am probably missing something then Yes :) There can be multiple implementations using the same specification and still be compatible. For example, the new "facelift" they talk about in the submission article would be a new implementation, but still compatible with the old one, as they would (publicly) mostly have the same interface, so they can still talk. There are many IPFS and libp2p implementations already, and they mostly aim first to be compatible with each other, so even if they work differently inside, they can communicate. Similarly as with BitTorrent where many clients implement the same specification and can therefore exchange data still, just like TCP or basically any protocol.
- omginternets 3y ago
  Agreed. One frustrating thing about PL is that they seem to make odd decisions that detract or distract from their main value proposition. In particular: - Filecoin is not interesting. IPFS and lip2p are interesting. - Renaming IPFS-the-application to Kubo is confusing - Naming the IPFS DHT "Amino" is confusing. Why does it even need its own name? I really wish PL would go through the occasional contraction phase where it prunes the bulk of its initiatives and re-focuses on what it does amazingly well. IPFS and libp2p are truly amazing.
  - mburns 3y ago
    > Why does it even need its own name? So that other DHT implementations can exist and potentially replace the existing one. Same for go-ipfs being renamed. We generally don’t have web browsers named after the protocol they use. And with multiple ipfs clients, one of them being named “ipfs” is itself confusing. Frankly, both should have probably happened years ago.
    - omginternets 3y ago
      >So that other DHT implementations can exist and potentially replace the existing one. What's wrong with e.g. "The IPFS DHT was using Kademlia and is now using Coral"? The result is that there are now more names for the same thing, and the old names have changed. This is more confusing, not less. Ditto for "IPFS" and "Foo's IPFS implementation".
      - mburns 3y ago
        > What's wrong with e.g. "The IPFS DHT was using Kademlia and is now using Coral"? Because that’s not what is happening. The Kademlia-like DHT is not going away. It just has a name (“Amino”) so you can refer to its as an implementation relative to other implementations that will coexist, not necessarily replace, the original. > The result is that there are now more names for the same thing, and the old names have changed. They gave a name to a thing that didn’t have a formal name, because it can compete with other implementations. Having distinct names for a service and an implementation isn’t uncommon. The only criticism is that they didn’t do it sooner. All of this seems pretty academic. The majority of developers and vast majority of users won’t know or care about the branding or abstractions allowing for different implementations. The tools work the way they did, hopefully faster. That’s it.
stavros 3y ago
Is IPFS working these days? I was very excited about it eight years ago, to the point where I made one of the first IPFS pinning services, but lost all my interest. IPFS is a great idea, but the implementation basically doesn't work, and it certainly doesn't work to the point where people can be running the node locally. It used to have tons of problems discovering content from other nodes on the network unless it was directly connected to them, and it broke often. It also didn't seem like Protocol Labs worked on any of these problems at all, focusing on launching a cryptocurrency instead. Has it changed now?
- Borg3 3y ago
  Well said. I too was looking at IPFS few times, but hardly could find a place to use it. Im a big fan of distributed storage or self hosting, but IPFS is far too static for anything usefull, except maybe archives of import static blobs.
  - diggan 3y ago
    What exactly are you unable to build with IPFS that requires it to be even more dynamic than what it is? I've found it flexible enough for most use cases I've had in mind, as long as you're flexible on how they architecture should look.
    - Borg3 3y ago
      Thats the point. I cant kinda wrap myself into it. I cant see it anything more that distributed object storage. So, calling it a future web is kinda exaggeration imo. Not sure. I host very simple web pages myself, and yet they are pretty dynamic on output. Can you point me to some interesting projects that utilize IPFS?
      - 2color 3y ago
        See https://awesome.ipfs.tech/ https://awesome.ipfs.tech/ and https://ecosystem.ipfs.tech/ https://ecosystem.ipfs.tech/ for some projects using IPFS
based-nerd 3y ago
IPFS is trash. The APIs and interfaces of which there are millions change signatures every 6 months. Your 4 month old code will not run anymore and fixing it is a real slog. Sigh.
tjrgergw 3y ago
Am I especially dumb, or is IPFS messaging really flaky? For example, I still don't understand how to access their resources. Do I need a special client? And this is coming from a person who LOVES torrents...
- h0h0h0h0111 3y ago
  There are a few client options; the most widely used one (to my knowledge) is https://github.com/ipfs/kubo https://github.com/ipfs/kubo for CLI. There's also a desktop client that's pretty nice: https://docs.ipfs.tech/install/ipfs-desktop/ https://docs.ipfs.tech/install/ipfs-desktop/
  - vorpalhex 3y ago
    I'm the techy "self hosting" provider for my friend group. Is kubo the right way to give my non-technical users access to ipfs? Do they need any extra tools like a browser extension?
    - wuiheerfoj 3y ago
      Probably IPFS desktop is best for them. There is also a browser extension that hooks into (brings with it?) IPFS desktop
- sp332 3y ago
  Brave has IPFS support built in now.
- mburns 3y ago
  It is more complicated than it needs to be, but very similar to the BitTorrent ecosystem. https://docs.ipfs.tech/install/ https://docs.ipfs.tech/install/ IPFS is a protocol, it needs a client. That client can be a web page or local software, just like torrents. Curl now supports downloading IPFS resources (but uses an HTTP gateway, it doesn’t talk to the DHT directly).
londons_explore 3y ago
The concept of an "Interplanetry Filesystem" is a good one. The actual IPFS implementation doesn't live up to expectations though. Expectations: * I want to be able to mount / as IPFS and know that I can boot linux from anywhere. * I want to have my photo library on IPFS and add to it from anywhere. * I want to be able to share anything on IPFS, and if someone else has already uploaded it for the upload to be instant. * I want all the storage on my phone/laptop/whatever permanently full of other peoples stuff, earning me credits to store my own data. * I want my stuff reed-solomon encoded with lots of other data, so that in case of a failure of a chunk of the network, my data is still recoverable. * I want the network to be fast and reliable with excellent sharding of data and minimal hotspotting.
- diggan 3y ago
  Are those expectations coming from reading the landing page at ipfs.tech, or where they come from? > * I want to be able to mount / as IPFS and know that I can boot linux from anywhere. A starting point: https://github.com/magik6k/netboot.ipfs https://github.com/magik6k/netboot.ipfs > * I want to have my photo library on IPFS and add to it from anywhere. I personally wouldn't keep my private photos on a public network, but everyone is different. You should be able to do this today, maybe you're saying that the client software for doing this is missing? Because the protocol would support it, but I'm not aware of any clients that would help you with this. > * I want to be able to share anything on IPFS, and if someone else has already uploaded it for the upload to be instant. You don't really "upload" anything to IPFS, ever, that's not how the protocol works. You "provide" something and then if someone requests it, you upload it directly to them. So in that way, "uploads" are already instant if the content already exists on the other node. > * I want all the storage on my phone/laptop/whatever permanently full of other peoples stuff, earning me credits to store my own data. > * I want my stuff reed-solomon encoded with lots of other data, so that in case of a failure of a chunk of the network, my data is still recoverable. These are both "solved" by Filecoin rather than IPFS, although you can solve the second one by yourself with IPFS by just running multiple nodes you yourself own. But the whole incentive part is (rightly) part of Filecoin rather than IPFS. > * I want the network to be fast and reliable with excellent sharding of data and minimal hotspotting. You and me both :)
j_m_b 3y ago
I've been looking into a private IPFS network as a way to share photos. It doesn't seem ready for that. Is there something out there that allows clients to update a mounted drive and keep in sync? Something that is transparent enough that ordinary users aren't intimidated to use it?
- h0h0h0h0111 3y ago
  I think https://fission.codes/ecosystem/wnfs/ https://fission.codes/ecosystem/wnfs/ might do what you want (though I don't know about viewing photos in browser etc). Alternatively, IPFS supports unixFS and a mutable filesystem through the desktop client if you are happy to host them on your own machine (it acts like a unix dir) edit: ah sorry, I see you actually asked for a private network. You could possibly look into https://ipfscluster.io/ https://ipfscluster.io/, though it might be a little heavyweight for what you're looking for
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- ianopolous 3y ago
  You can do that with peergos [1]- mount a peergos folder locally using FUSE. Or login to the web interface and share easily and privately. [1] https://github.com/peergos/peergos https://github.com/peergos/peergos
- GTP 3y ago
  Maybe Syncthing would work for you? [1] [1] https://syncthing.net/ https://syncthing.net/
  - vorpalhex 3y ago
    Syncthing with "copycat" as a web UI and Samba access is what I give to my users. People who onboard to syncthing like it but usually need help on initial setup.
- richarme 3y ago
  I'm building something that solves this problem. I'd love to hear more about your use case, is it something you'd like to discuss or join a beta down the line? If so, reach out at marc@ at my username .net
silotis 3y ago
> assuming a network size of ~25k DHT Server nodes I guess they've given up on the idea of end users running full nodes. There still might be some value in having a federated CDN service, but I think they will struggle to compete with centralized CDNs for all the same reasons other federated services have struggled.
Double_a_92 3y ago
I never really understood IPFS... It seems to be something similar to Torrents, but with a subtle smell if crypto bullshit smell attached to it.
- chriswarbo 3y ago
  It's like bittorrent (for sending chunks between peers) + DHT (for discovering which peers have which chunks) + magnet links (to identify files based on a hash of their chunks). It's unlike bittorrent in that there are no '.torrent' files (only content hashes), no trackers, and chunks are global/pooled/shared (i.e. they're not specific to the file they came from). The crypto bullshit is "filecoin", which tries to incentivise people to host other people's stuff. It can be safely ignored (I certainly do).
  - palata 3y ago
    What makes it desirable as opposed to bittorrent?
    - chriswarbo 3y ago
      Bittorrent is based around individual "torrents", which may contain many files. Separate torrents are completely unrelated to each other: for example, if I'm seeding an old Ubuntu release, and you're trying to download a newer release, then you won't connect to me; even if many of the files in that release are identical (e.g. config files from /etc, Python libraries that haven't seen an update, etc.). Since IPFS is a global swarm (or, in principle, "interplanetary"), then your download will fetch the files I'm seeding. Indeed, you can fetch chunks from different files, if they happen to share some contents (e.g. if a Fedora release patches the end of a script, you can still fetch the initial part without the patch). Since we're not artificially partitioning/siloing our data, two people who happen to share the same file will end up generating the same URL: fetching that URL can get chunks from either. This is nice since it avoids any need to coordinate, or even know of each others' existence: we can just share whatever we like, and the network will ensure downloaders will find seeders. This can even happen across time: if some files lose all their seeders then their URLs will stop resolving; but if someone later happens to share the same files, then those same URLs will start resolving again. This makes it easy to host Web sites without needing a reliable machine or connection (just seed it from a few machines; as long as one's up, it should work); it also lets us refer to URLs that are host-agnostic, and which we can even seed ourselves (rather than e.g. npm.org URLs, which may be deleted like "leftpad"; or github.com URLs which may be deleted, e.g. when projects jumped ship after Microsoft bought the site).
GTP 3y ago
Is any of you currently using IPFS? What's your use-case?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
kosolam 3y ago
Works fine for us so far. Discovery of newly added files is immediate. Downloading speed is fast. It’s quite easy to get this to work, you need to have a few or more instances with these objects pinned. And make sure the bandwidth and other resources are sufficient and the servers are always online. Or use a reliable pinning service that can do this for you.
jl6 3y ago
It would be nice if there was an IPFS implementation with much lower memory requirements. I tried a while back on something equivalent to a “free tier VM” and it quickly ate all available RAM.
eternityforest 3y ago
I still think the biggest problem with IPFS is that they put every block of every file in the DHT. It's just insane compared to BitTorrent, which only puts the top level torrent info in the DHT. Having the option to pin just one file is useful, but they could greatly reduce DHT traffic if they didn't need to allow access to arbitrary resources without starting at some parent block. BitTorrent requires you access files via a collection, and only the collections are stored in the DHT, and the bandwidth use when idle is single digit kb. I think BitTorrent itself could be extended to cover most IPFS use cases, possibly better than IPFS itself, although IPFSes database-like stuff is pretty unique.
- anacrolix 3y ago
  Yes, you are completely correct. And BitTorrent is absolutely usable everywhere that IPFS is being used. https://github.com/anacrolix/btlink https://github.com/anacrolix/btlink https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37771434 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37771434

134 points by dennis-tra 3y ago

mtillman 3y ago

I clicked About and received a 500 Error “Importing a module script failed”.

pierat 3y ago
Ah, so you pulled it from IPFS. That's the usual experience.

guntherhermann 3y ago

> The “Public IPFS DHT” is henceforth going to be called “Amino”. This follows along with the trend from 2022 in the IPFS ecosystem to use more precise language to create space for alternative options I'd argue that "Public IPFS DHT", if less catchy, is far more precise than "Amino".

bembo 3y ago
I think the point is that amino is just one public ipfs dht, so they renamed it, so that other public ipfs dhts can exist without confusion.
Retr0id 3y ago
It's less precise because there are many ways one could implement a "Public IPFS DHT". "Public IPFS DHT" is a concept, Amino is a concrete instantiation of that concept.
diggan 3y ago
As the quoted part mentions, if they'd call it "The Public IPFS DHT", there isn't really any room for someone else to create something that could replace it, because There Could Be Only One. With a specific name for the specific implementation of a general concept, others could provide alternative implementations implementing the same concept.
- cjrp 3y ago
  Call it "The Public IPFS DHT v1.0" then ;)
  - ethbr1 3y ago
    Because that wouldn't be confusing if a novel implementation named itself "The Public IPFS DHT v2.0"? Specificity >> descriptiveness, when you're aiming for a distributed future with multiple parties As much as I hate AWS' jungle of names, I get why they did it. And it's probably better than any alternative
- somat 3y ago
  I am probably missing something then, but as far as I can tell most of the value proposition of ipfs is the single universal dht. if you remove or fragment it now all you have is basically a worse bittorrent. Most of the interesting things I want to do with ipfs involve the dht, any sort of file transfer is usually a secondary concern.
  - diggan 3y ago
    > I am probably missing something then Yes :) There can be multiple implementations using the same specification and still be compatible. For example, the new "facelift" they talk about in the submission article would be a new implementation, but still compatible with the old one, as they would (publicly) mostly have the same interface, so they can still talk. There are many IPFS and libp2p implementations already, and they mostly aim first to be compatible with each other, so even if they work differently inside, they can communicate. Similarly as with BitTorrent where many clients implement the same specification and can therefore exchange data still, just like TCP or basically any protocol.
omginternets 3y ago
Agreed. One frustrating thing about PL is that they seem to make odd decisions that detract or distract from their main value proposition. In particular: - Filecoin is not interesting. IPFS and lip2p are interesting. - Renaming IPFS-the-application to Kubo is confusing - Naming the IPFS DHT "Amino" is confusing. Why does it even need its own name? I really wish PL would go through the occasional contraction phase where it prunes the bulk of its initiatives and re-focuses on what it does amazingly well. IPFS and libp2p are truly amazing.
- mburns 3y ago
  > Why does it even need its own name? So that other DHT implementations can exist and potentially replace the existing one. Same for go-ipfs being renamed. We generally don’t have web browsers named after the protocol they use. And with multiple ipfs clients, one of them being named “ipfs” is itself confusing. Frankly, both should have probably happened years ago.
  - omginternets 3y ago
    >So that other DHT implementations can exist and potentially replace the existing one. What's wrong with e.g. "The IPFS DHT was using Kademlia and is now using Coral"? The result is that there are now more names for the same thing, and the old names have changed. This is more confusing, not less. Ditto for "IPFS" and "Foo's IPFS implementation".
    - mburns 3y ago
      > What's wrong with e.g. "The IPFS DHT was using Kademlia and is now using Coral"? Because that’s not what is happening. The Kademlia-like DHT is not going away. It just has a name (“Amino”) so you can refer to its as an implementation relative to other implementations that will coexist, not necessarily replace, the original. > The result is that there are now more names for the same thing, and the old names have changed. They gave a name to a thing that didn’t have a formal name, because it can compete with other implementations. Having distinct names for a service and an implementation isn’t uncommon. The only criticism is that they didn’t do it sooner. All of this seems pretty academic. The majority of developers and vast majority of users won’t know or care about the branding or abstractions allowing for different implementations. The tools work the way they did, hopefully faster. That’s it.

stavros 3y ago

Is IPFS working these days? I was very excited about it eight years ago, to the point where I made one of the first IPFS pinning services, but lost all my interest. IPFS is a great idea, but the implementation basically doesn't work, and it certainly doesn't work to the point where people can be running the node locally. It used to have tons of problems discovering content from other nodes on the network unless it was directly connected to them, and it broke often. It also didn't seem like Protocol Labs worked on any of these problems at all, focusing on launching a cryptocurrency instead. Has it changed now?

Borg3 3y ago
Well said. I too was looking at IPFS few times, but hardly could find a place to use it. Im a big fan of distributed storage or self hosting, but IPFS is far too static for anything usefull, except maybe archives of import static blobs.
- diggan 3y ago
  What exactly are you unable to build with IPFS that requires it to be even more dynamic than what it is? I've found it flexible enough for most use cases I've had in mind, as long as you're flexible on how they architecture should look.
  - Borg3 3y ago
    Thats the point. I cant kinda wrap myself into it. I cant see it anything more that distributed object storage. So, calling it a future web is kinda exaggeration imo. Not sure. I host very simple web pages myself, and yet they are pretty dynamic on output. Can you point me to some interesting projects that utilize IPFS?
    - 2color 3y ago
      See https://awesome.ipfs.tech/ https://awesome.ipfs.tech/ and https://ecosystem.ipfs.tech/ https://ecosystem.ipfs.tech/ for some projects using IPFS

based-nerd 3y ago

IPFS is trash. The APIs and interfaces of which there are millions change signatures every 6 months. Your 4 month old code will not run anymore and fixing it is a real slog. Sigh.

tjrgergw 3y ago

Am I especially dumb, or is IPFS messaging really flaky? For example, I still don't understand how to access their resources. Do I need a special client? And this is coming from a person who LOVES torrents...

h0h0h0h0111 3y ago
There are a few client options; the most widely used one (to my knowledge) is https://github.com/ipfs/kubo https://github.com/ipfs/kubo for CLI. There's also a desktop client that's pretty nice: https://docs.ipfs.tech/install/ipfs-desktop/ https://docs.ipfs.tech/install/ipfs-desktop/
- vorpalhex 3y ago
  I'm the techy "self hosting" provider for my friend group. Is kubo the right way to give my non-technical users access to ipfs? Do they need any extra tools like a browser extension?
  - wuiheerfoj 3y ago
    Probably IPFS desktop is best for them. There is also a browser extension that hooks into (brings with it?) IPFS desktop
sp332 3y ago
Brave has IPFS support built in now.
mburns 3y ago
It is more complicated than it needs to be, but very similar to the BitTorrent ecosystem. https://docs.ipfs.tech/install/ https://docs.ipfs.tech/install/ IPFS is a protocol, it needs a client. That client can be a web page or local software, just like torrents. Curl now supports downloading IPFS resources (but uses an HTTP gateway, it doesn’t talk to the DHT directly).

londons_explore 3y ago

The concept of an "Interplanetry Filesystem" is a good one. The actual IPFS implementation doesn't live up to expectations though. Expectations: * I want to be able to mount / as IPFS and know that I can boot linux from anywhere. * I want to have my photo library on IPFS and add to it from anywhere. * I want to be able to share anything on IPFS, and if someone else has already uploaded it for the upload to be instant. * I want all the storage on my phone/laptop/whatever permanently full of other peoples stuff, earning me credits to store my own data. * I want my stuff reed-solomon encoded with lots of other data, so that in case of a failure of a chunk of the network, my data is still recoverable. * I want the network to be fast and reliable with excellent sharding of data and minimal hotspotting.

diggan 3y ago
Are those expectations coming from reading the landing page at ipfs.tech, or where they come from? > * I want to be able to mount / as IPFS and know that I can boot linux from anywhere. A starting point: https://github.com/magik6k/netboot.ipfs https://github.com/magik6k/netboot.ipfs > * I want to have my photo library on IPFS and add to it from anywhere. I personally wouldn't keep my private photos on a public network, but everyone is different. You should be able to do this today, maybe you're saying that the client software for doing this is missing? Because the protocol would support it, but I'm not aware of any clients that would help you with this. > * I want to be able to share anything on IPFS, and if someone else has already uploaded it for the upload to be instant. You don't really "upload" anything to IPFS, ever, that's not how the protocol works. You "provide" something and then if someone requests it, you upload it directly to them. So in that way, "uploads" are already instant if the content already exists on the other node. > * I want all the storage on my phone/laptop/whatever permanently full of other peoples stuff, earning me credits to store my own data. > * I want my stuff reed-solomon encoded with lots of other data, so that in case of a failure of a chunk of the network, my data is still recoverable. These are both "solved" by Filecoin rather than IPFS, although you can solve the second one by yourself with IPFS by just running multiple nodes you yourself own. But the whole incentive part is (rightly) part of Filecoin rather than IPFS. > * I want the network to be fast and reliable with excellent sharding of data and minimal hotspotting. You and me both :)

j_m_b 3y ago

I've been looking into a private IPFS network as a way to share photos. It doesn't seem ready for that. Is there something out there that allows clients to update a mounted drive and keep in sync? Something that is transparent enough that ordinary users aren't intimidated to use it?

h0h0h0h0111 3y ago
I think https://fission.codes/ecosystem/wnfs/ https://fission.codes/ecosystem/wnfs/ might do what you want (though I don't know about viewing photos in browser etc). Alternatively, IPFS supports unixFS and a mutable filesystem through the desktop client if you are happy to host them on your own machine (it acts like a unix dir) edit: ah sorry, I see you actually asked for a private network. You could possibly look into https://ipfscluster.io/ https://ipfscluster.io/, though it might be a little heavyweight for what you're looking for
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
ianopolous 3y ago
You can do that with peergos [1]- mount a peergos folder locally using FUSE. Or login to the web interface and share easily and privately. [1] https://github.com/peergos/peergos https://github.com/peergos/peergos
GTP 3y ago
Maybe Syncthing would work for you? [1] [1] https://syncthing.net/ https://syncthing.net/
- vorpalhex 3y ago
  Syncthing with "copycat" as a web UI and Samba access is what I give to my users. People who onboard to syncthing like it but usually need help on initial setup.
richarme 3y ago
I'm building something that solves this problem. I'd love to hear more about your use case, is it something you'd like to discuss or join a beta down the line? If so, reach out at marc@ at my username .net

silotis 3y ago

> assuming a network size of ~25k DHT Server nodes I guess they've given up on the idea of end users running full nodes. There still might be some value in having a federated CDN service, but I think they will struggle to compete with centralized CDNs for all the same reasons other federated services have struggled.

Double_a_92 3y ago

I never really understood IPFS... It seems to be something similar to Torrents, but with a subtle smell if crypto bullshit smell attached to it.

chriswarbo 3y ago
It's like bittorrent (for sending chunks between peers) + DHT (for discovering which peers have which chunks) + magnet links (to identify files based on a hash of their chunks). It's unlike bittorrent in that there are no '.torrent' files (only content hashes), no trackers, and chunks are global/pooled/shared (i.e. they're not specific to the file they came from). The crypto bullshit is "filecoin", which tries to incentivise people to host other people's stuff. It can be safely ignored (I certainly do).
- palata 3y ago
  What makes it desirable as opposed to bittorrent?
  - chriswarbo 3y ago
    Bittorrent is based around individual "torrents", which may contain many files. Separate torrents are completely unrelated to each other: for example, if I'm seeding an old Ubuntu release, and you're trying to download a newer release, then you won't connect to me; even if many of the files in that release are identical (e.g. config files from /etc, Python libraries that haven't seen an update, etc.). Since IPFS is a global swarm (or, in principle, "interplanetary"), then your download will fetch the files I'm seeding. Indeed, you can fetch chunks from different files, if they happen to share some contents (e.g. if a Fedora release patches the end of a script, you can still fetch the initial part without the patch). Since we're not artificially partitioning/siloing our data, two people who happen to share the same file will end up generating the same URL: fetching that URL can get chunks from either. This is nice since it avoids any need to coordinate, or even know of each others' existence: we can just share whatever we like, and the network will ensure downloaders will find seeders. This can even happen across time: if some files lose all their seeders then their URLs will stop resolving; but if someone later happens to share the same files, then those same URLs will start resolving again. This makes it easy to host Web sites without needing a reliable machine or connection (just seed it from a few machines; as long as one's up, it should work); it also lets us refer to URLs that are host-agnostic, and which we can even seed ourselves (rather than e.g. npm.org URLs, which may be deleted like "leftpad"; or github.com URLs which may be deleted, e.g. when projects jumped ship after Microsoft bought the site).

GTP 3y ago

Is any of you currently using IPFS? What's your use-case?

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

kosolam 3y ago

Works fine for us so far. Discovery of newly added files is immediate. Downloading speed is fast. It’s quite easy to get this to work, you need to have a few or more instances with these objects pinned. And make sure the bandwidth and other resources are sufficient and the servers are always online. Or use a reliable pinning service that can do this for you.

jl6 3y ago

It would be nice if there was an IPFS implementation with much lower memory requirements. I tried a while back on something equivalent to a “free tier VM” and it quickly ate all available RAM.

eternityforest 3y ago

I still think the biggest problem with IPFS is that they put every block of every file in the DHT. It's just insane compared to BitTorrent, which only puts the top level torrent info in the DHT. Having the option to pin just one file is useful, but they could greatly reduce DHT traffic if they didn't need to allow access to arbitrary resources without starting at some parent block. BitTorrent requires you access files via a collection, and only the collections are stored in the DHT, and the bandwidth use when idle is single digit kb. I think BitTorrent itself could be extended to cover most IPFS use cases, possibly better than IPFS itself, although IPFSes database-like stuff is pretty unique.

anacrolix 3y ago
Yes, you are completely correct. And BitTorrent is absolutely usable everywhere that IPFS is being used. https://github.com/anacrolix/btlink https://github.com/anacrolix/btlink https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37771434 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37771434