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Wouldn't all those examples also work just as easily with torrents/magnet-links? I think in all those cases a central server distribution model has unfortunatel

by geokon 3y ago

Wouldn't all those examples also work just as easily with torrents/magnet-links? I think in all those cases a central server distribution model has unfortunately been "good enough" for the majority of users (even though their data is mined and ads are injected) When it comes to FOSS, I personally don't understand why something like a package manager isn't P2P by default. It feels very aligned with the hacker culture - a la "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace". Virtually nobody uses it, so the solutions are half baked, clunky and not integrated with every day workflows (ex: browsers don't support anything P2P). Something like libcurl can't pull a torrent from the web

anthk 3y ago
P2P works better for ISO based distros with full offline backups or maybe LTS based distros with small repos as Hyperbola. Having a full repo of Trisquel with continuous updates would not work well.
- geokon 3y ago
  Oh right, that's a very good point. I've only use LTS for years. Forgot about rolling releases haha
sseagull 3y ago
> Wouldn't all those examples also work just as easily with torrents/magnet-links? My (possibly wrong) feeling is that IPFS is meant for smaller files, and torrents for bigger collections. So with the example of a package manager, you could download each individual package via IPFS, whereas a torrent would make sense if you wanted to download an archive of them all. Not to say torrents couldn't work, but it just kinda feels like not the intended use case. (The above feeling come from reading about IPFS a few times throughout the years and toying with it for a while).
rakoo 3y ago
There has been attempts at doing torrent-based package distribution, see the notes of debian testing it here: https://wiki.debian.org/DebTorrent https://wiki.debian.org/DebTorrent. There are basically 2 problems: Packages are a lot of small files, and not everyone is interested in them all. Torrents are good for large content that everyone wants. The two are in opposition and there needs to be a balance: do you need to make One Unique Torrent with everything, but then peers have to individually ask each and every other peer if they have the content they're looking for, making it unscalable ? Or do you make one torrent per package, meaning peers have to track thousands of torrents ? (That's the direction IPFS took, which is why it's extremely inefficient and resource-heavy). DebTorrent has made the choice to go in the middle. The real problem, to me, is that content-addressed content is the anti-privacy protocol: since you ask everyone "do you have this content", you're basically telling everyone what you want. In the case of installing packages, this means telling everyone what the version of your packages is, and is potentially a security issue. But the real "problem" is that it fails at being much more better than the existing solution. Bandwidth is cheap, storage is cheap, so hosting everything on a few independent but centralized servers is good enough.

by geokon 3y ago

anthk 3y ago

P2P works better for ISO based distros with full offline backups or maybe LTS based distros with small repos as Hyperbola. Having a full repo of Trisquel with continuous updates would not work well.

geokon 3y ago
Oh right, that's a very good point. I've only use LTS for years. Forgot about rolling releases haha

sseagull 3y ago

> Wouldn't all those examples also work just as easily with torrents/magnet-links? My (possibly wrong) feeling is that IPFS is meant for smaller files, and torrents for bigger collections. So with the example of a package manager, you could download each individual package via IPFS, whereas a torrent would make sense if you wanted to download an archive of them all. Not to say torrents couldn't work, but it just kinda feels like not the intended use case. (The above feeling come from reading about IPFS a few times throughout the years and toying with it for a while).

rakoo 3y ago

There has been attempts at doing torrent-based package distribution, see the notes of debian testing it here: https://wiki.debian.org/DebTorrent https://wiki.debian.org/DebTorrent. There are basically 2 problems: Packages are a lot of small files, and not everyone is interested in them all. Torrents are good for large content that everyone wants. The two are in opposition and there needs to be a balance: do you need to make One Unique Torrent with everything, but then peers have to individually ask each and every other peer if they have the content they're looking for, making it unscalable ? Or do you make one torrent per package, meaning peers have to track thousands of torrents ? (That's the direction IPFS took, which is why it's extremely inefficient and resource-heavy). DebTorrent has made the choice to go in the middle. The real problem, to me, is that content-addressed content is the anti-privacy protocol: since you ask everyone "do you have this content", you're basically telling everyone what you want. In the case of installing packages, this means telling everyone what the version of your packages is, and is potentially a security issue. But the real "problem" is that it fails at being much more better than the existing solution. Bandwidth is cheap, storage is cheap, so hosting everything on a few independent but centralized servers is good enough.