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I also was very active in the early IPFS days. I think two points really atributted to your experience 1. Success: IPFS got tons of usage early on so scaling t

by theK 3y ago

I also was very active in the early IPFS days. I think two points really atributted to your experience 1. Success: IPFS got tons of usage early on so scaling the software (which back then was mostly a prototype) was challenging, especially with Bennett's BDFL initial stance. 2. The need to codify an incentives market which then lead to the creation of filecoin took a lot of effort and setting up a trustworthy org around that one and ipfs got even more challenging So Yes, working with IPFS was not plain sailing (and still isn't) but it seems that by now the two projects have been set up to start iterating again and I see a lot of great work happening on both fronts so it looks lika a promising future here. Source: I have worked and am still working with both IPFS and Filecoin as part of my business

noman-land 3y ago
Can you say a bit about using it for your business? Curious how people are using IPFS in the real world.
- theK 3y ago
  Apart from the obvious web3 stuff there are some interesting usecases for classical enterprise software. Caveat, my experience is limited to clusters below 100 nodes. You can run your private IPFS DHT if you want and the protocol has some cool load shedding features. There is also IPFS cluster which adds data availability features to your IPFS deployments. When we tried private IPFS networks the cluster project was relatively early and we found that managing DA in the application that owns the data ended up being more straight forward so we didn't use that but I've heard good things lately. If you don't need to enforce access management across your internal data calls it can be an interesting alternative to stuff like minio or ceph. YMMV but my experience was that, running a private IPFS cluster can be easier and much more flexible than running a similarly scaled minio or ceph deployment. It can be seen as a shift left like DevOps is. Instead of having each internal app on your project depend on a Data team that manages Ceph or another data storage and access technology you run (most of) it yourself.
- zubairq 3y ago
  I’m actually using it for sharing enterprise components so that a document saved in one company can be sent to another company and the document loads content from IPFS. All this without needing a central server
chriswarbo 3y ago
> 2. The need to codify an incentives market which then lead to the creation of filecoin took a lot of effort and setting up a trustworthy org around that one and ipfs got even more challenging I see this as a non-goal: HTTP is doing fine without an "incentives market", and that's the sort of core layer IPFS is suited for. When I switch off my HTTP servers, there's no expectation that the resources they're hosting remain accessible; and the same is true for IPFS. The advantage of IPFS is that it allows resources to remain accessible, e.g. if someone else cares enough to host it too, or if I happen to have copies buried on some old boxen (without having to coordinate some load-balanced shenanigans up-front). For example, we can avoid "leftpad" fiascos if software companies could host their own dependencies (as in, contribute to ensuring their canonical URLs resolve; rather than current practice of re-hosting copies at myriad private URLs, or routing their network through caching proxies). Good luck to other projects which want to work on such a thing (Filecoin, etc.), but it's mostly orthogonal to IPFS itself.
- theK 3y ago
  > The advantage of IPFS is that it allows resources to remain accessible, e.g. if someone else cares enough to ho... I think there is a key point here. This exactly is the reason why incentives markets built around IPFS are so relevant. They democratize the act of saying "I care about that data". Nowadays you need to be a poweruser to express this but with the world's content being more and more digital media this isn't the realm of the poweruser any more.
  - chriswarbo 3y ago
    > I think there is a key point here. This exactly is the reason why incentives markets built around IPFS are so relevant. I fundamentally disagree. If someone wants to make filesharing easier, go ahead (personally I think dragging files into a "Shared" folder, like eDonkey/Kazaa/Limewire/etc. would be easier for non-"powerusers" than minting and securing a crypto wallet and trying to convince others of its value in exchange for storage space, but whatever). To me, such projects seem about as relevant for IPFS as, say, Geocities is for HTTP.

by theK 3y ago

noman-land 3y ago

Can you say a bit about using it for your business? Curious how people are using IPFS in the real world.

theK 3y ago
Apart from the obvious web3 stuff there are some interesting usecases for classical enterprise software. Caveat, my experience is limited to clusters below 100 nodes. You can run your private IPFS DHT if you want and the protocol has some cool load shedding features. There is also IPFS cluster which adds data availability features to your IPFS deployments. When we tried private IPFS networks the cluster project was relatively early and we found that managing DA in the application that owns the data ended up being more straight forward so we didn't use that but I've heard good things lately. If you don't need to enforce access management across your internal data calls it can be an interesting alternative to stuff like minio or ceph. YMMV but my experience was that, running a private IPFS cluster can be easier and much more flexible than running a similarly scaled minio or ceph deployment. It can be seen as a shift left like DevOps is. Instead of having each internal app on your project depend on a Data team that manages Ceph or another data storage and access technology you run (most of) it yourself.
zubairq 3y ago
I’m actually using it for sharing enterprise components so that a document saved in one company can be sent to another company and the document loads content from IPFS. All this without needing a central server

chriswarbo 3y ago

> 2. The need to codify an incentives market which then lead to the creation of filecoin took a lot of effort and setting up a trustworthy org around that one and ipfs got even more challenging I see this as a non-goal: HTTP is doing fine without an "incentives market", and that's the sort of core layer IPFS is suited for. When I switch off my HTTP servers, there's no expectation that the resources they're hosting remain accessible; and the same is true for IPFS. The advantage of IPFS is that it allows resources to remain accessible, e.g. if someone else cares enough to host it too, or if I happen to have copies buried on some old boxen (without having to coordinate some load-balanced shenanigans up-front). For example, we can avoid "leftpad" fiascos if software companies could host their own dependencies (as in, contribute to ensuring their canonical URLs resolve; rather than current practice of re-hosting copies at myriad private URLs, or routing their network through caching proxies). Good luck to other projects which want to work on such a thing (Filecoin, etc.), but it's mostly orthogonal to IPFS itself.

theK 3y ago
> The advantage of IPFS is that it allows resources to remain accessible, e.g. if someone else cares enough to ho... I think there is a key point here. This exactly is the reason why incentives markets built around IPFS are so relevant. They democratize the act of saying "I care about that data". Nowadays you need to be a poweruser to express this but with the world's content being more and more digital media this isn't the realm of the poweruser any more.
- chriswarbo 3y ago
  > I think there is a key point here. This exactly is the reason why incentives markets built around IPFS are so relevant. I fundamentally disagree. If someone wants to make filesharing easier, go ahead (personally I think dragging files into a "Shared" folder, like eDonkey/Kazaa/Limewire/etc. would be easier for non-"powerusers" than minting and securing a crypto wallet and trying to convince others of its value in exchange for storage space, but whatever). To me, such projects seem about as relevant for IPFS as, say, Geocities is for HTTP.