12 ms·

I moved my blog from IPFS to a server

330 points by neiman 3y ago

schmichael 3y ago
> I pinned content from my own server and played forever with settings and definitions, but couldn’t get the content to be available everywhere. > The blog you’re reading now is built with Jekyll and is hosted on my own 10$ server. > don’t get me wrong, I’m still an IPFS fanboy. ...how could you still be a fanboy? When IPFS cannot fulfill even the most basic function of globally serving static content, why does it deserve anyone's interest? It's not even new or cutting edge at this point. After 8 years of development how can the most basic functionality still not work for even an expert?
- neiman 3y ago
  It worked fine before for many years when it was slightly less popular. They're having growing pains due to scalability problems and some libraries, like Helia (the JS library of IPFS), being new. I guess I'm also quite stubborn in wanting to do it my way, without the aid of any services, and for the content I pin to be available in all places, including Helia in the browser.
  - p4bl0 3y ago
    The official IPFS client in Go has always been very, very hungry for resources. At some point it crashed because it needed to many file descriptors if it ran for too long. Even for a simple static site with infrequent update it needed some maintenance. But even if one was willing to put the effort in, it was not actually rewarded, because if your server were you pin your website is offline, the truth is that your site is offline too, so what's the point?
- withinboredom 3y ago
  [wrong thread]
  - TheRealPomax 3y ago
    What on earth are you talking about? IPFS has nothing to do with "coins", it's a distributed data management system. You can use IPFS for finance in the same way you can use a database for finance. You can also use IPFS for literally anything else that falls in the "data that you want other people to be able to access" category.
    - withinboredom 3y ago
      oh shit, I replied to the wrong comment.
    - nottorp 3y ago
      But it seems associated with blockchain and something named filecoin? There goes all credibility.
      - TheRealPomax 3y ago
        Yeah we've kind of been using the block chain since the end of the 15th century. Something using public "double" book keeping to ensure data integrity across a network (digital or otherwise) doesn't magically make that data a currency just because some Japanese guy's pet project became too popular for its own good =)
        nottorp 3y ago
        Oh. Are you sure there aren't stone tables with block chain?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- heipei 3y ago
  It's working fabulously for hosting phishing websites frontend by the popular IPFS gateway providers like Cloudflare, so at least there's that...
lindig 3y ago
Filecoin, which is based on IPFS, creates a market for unused storage. I think that idea is great but for adoption it needs to be as simple as Dropbox to store files. But visit https://filecoin.io/ https://filecoin.io/ and the dropbox-like app that you could be willing to try is nowhere to be found. So maybe it is an enterprise solution? That isn't spelled out either. So I am not surprised that this has little traction and the article further confirms the impression.
- pierat 3y ago
  Here's your $.10/day for that 1GB with bandwidth... but running the filecoin stack will cost you a $50/mo server. That fucker's a PIG on cpu and ram.
  - kkielhofner 3y ago
    IPFS is as well. Clearly much more going on but take a machine that can serve 10k req/s with [insert 100 things here] without flinching and watch it maybe, just maybe, do 10 with IPFS. I'm not kidding.
- diggan 3y ago
  > to be as simple as Dropbox to store files. But visit https://filecoin.io/ https://filecoin.io/ and the dropbox-like app that you could be willing to try is nowhere to be found I agree with this fully. But as said elsewhere, it's kind of far away from that, and also slightly misdirected. Imagine asking someone to get started with web development by sending them to https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc793.txt https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc793.txt (the TCP specification). Filecoin is just the protocol, and won't ever solve that particular problem, as it's not focused on solving that particular problem, it's up to client implementations to solve. But the ecosystem is for sure missing an easy to use / end-user application like Dropbox for storing files in a decentralized and secure way.
- poorman 3y ago
  That flagship app you are looking for seems to be https://nft.storage/ https://nft.storage/ (by Protocol Labs).
p4bl0 3y ago
I'm surprised by the beginning of the post talking about pioneering in 2019. Maybe it is the case for ENS (I never cared for it), but regarding IPFS, my website was available over IPFS 3 years before that in 2016 [1]. Granted, I was never IPFS only. I also started publishing a series of article about censorship-resistant internet (Tor, I2P, IPFS, and ZeroNet) in 2600 Magazine – The Hacker Quarterly – back in 2017 [2]. Anyway, I came to the same conclusion as the author, but several years ago: in the end, nothing is actually decentralized, and maintaining this illusion of decentralization is actually costly, for no real purpose (other than the initial enjoyment of playing with a new tech, that is). So I stopped maintaining it a few years ago. That decision was also because of the growing involvement of some of these projects with blockchain tech that I never wanted to be a part of. This is also why I cancelled my article series in 2600 before publishing those on IPFS and ZeroNet. [1] See for example this archive of my HN profile page from 2016 with the link to it: https://web.archive.org/web/20161122210110/https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=p4bl0 https://web.archive.org/web/20161122210110/https://news.ycom... [2] https://pablo.rauzy.name/outreach.html#2600 https://pablo.rauzy.name/outreach.html#2600
- neiman 3y ago
  > Maybe it is the case for ENS Oh yeah, I was referring strictly to IPFS+ENS websites. I have been working with it for several years so my mind goes for this use-case automatically.
- r3trohack3r 3y ago
  > Anyway, I came to the same conclusion as the author, but several years ago: in the end, nothing is actually decentralized, and maintaining this illusion of decentralization is actually costly, for no real purpose (other than the initial enjoyment of playing with a new tech, that is). Do you have any writing (blog posts, HN comments, etc.) where you explore this thought more? I'm in the thick of building p2p software, very interested in what you came to know during that time.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - 3y ago
nonrandomstring 3y ago
Well done to the author for writing this up. Having tried fringe technologies over the years, spun up a server and run them for a few months, struggled and seen all the rough edges and loose threads, I often come to the point of feeling - this technology is good, but it's not ready yet. Time to let more determined people carry the torch. The upside is: - you tried, and so contributed to the ecosystem - you told people what needs improving Just quitting and not writing about your experience seems a waste for everyone, so good to know why web hosting on IPFS is still rough.
yieldcrv 3y ago
I host all the static files of my Netlify and Vercel servers on IPFS it is simple enough and free even on hosted solutions, and it keeps my Netlify and Vercel free during spikes in traffic but the availability issue is perplexing, just like OP encountered some people just randomly wont be able to resolve some assets on your site, sometimes! the gateways go up and down, their cache of your file comes and goes. browsers dont natively resolve ipfs:// uris. its very weird.
- indigodaddy 3y ago
  “ and it keeps my Netlify and Vercel free during spikes in traffic” — how exactly would this help re: potentially breaching outbound transfer limits?
  - yieldcrv 3y ago
    if static assets arent being requested from their server then it would not contribute to your bandwidth meter
    - indigodaddy 3y ago
      You still have to transfer that data through the network pipe to the end user no? How the server itself accesses the files to do so seems irrelevant to me.
      - Drblessing 3y ago
        I think if the assets are served in the html from ipfs gateway, then it doesn't add to your outbound traffic. Also once browsers support natively ipfs:// static content the game changes and the IPFS party really gets started.
MenhirMike 3y ago
> the more readers it has, the faster it is to use it since some readers help to spread the content (Scalable). In other words: Once a few big websites are established, no small website will ever be able to gain traction again because the big websites are simply easier to reach and thus more attractive to use. And just like an unpopular old torrent, eventually you run out of seeders and your site is lost forever. One can argue about the value of low traffic websites, but I got to wonder: Who in their right mind thinks "Yeah, I want to make a website and then have others decide if it's allowed to live". Then again, maybe that kind of "survival of the fittest" is appealing to some folks. As far as I am concerned, it sounds like a stupid idea. (Which the author goes into more detail, so that's a good write up)
- lelandbatey 3y ago
  It's not up to others alone; you get a say too because you can seed your own content and that can be fast. In the worst case of no interest, then it's approximately the same as you hosting your own website in the world of today. This doesn't exonerate the shortfall of the "old torrent" pattern though, as you say.
- fodkodrasz 3y ago
  This is a false dilemma. Why would you not "seed" (pin) your own site, and be at others' mercy? You pin it, and when others also do so, the readers get faster and more redundant service.
  - kimixa 3y ago
    For "unpopular" sites having a single origin somewhat removes the advantages of IPFS, it's not decentralized, not censorship resilient, and still costs the publisher for ongoing infrastructure to host it. Yet still had the disadvantages and complexity of IPFS vs a static http server. So if you're not going to be publishing something that will always have multiple copies floating around, why use IPFS?
    - fodkodrasz 3y ago
koito17 3y ago
> it’s quite an inconvenience to run your own IPFS node. But even if you do run your own node, the fact you access a website doesn’t mean you pin it. Not at all. This has always been my major UX gripe with IPFS. The fact that `ipfs add` in the command line does little but generate a hash and you need to actually pin things in order to "seed" them, so to speak. So "adding a file to IPFS", in the sense of "adding a file to the network", requires the user to know that (1) the "add" in `ipfs add` does not add a file to the network, and (2) you must pin everything you want to replicate manually. I remember as recently as 2021 having to manually pin each file in a directory since pinning the directory does not recursively pin files. Doing this by hand for small folders is okay, but large folders? Not so much. More importantly, the BitTorrent duplication problems that IPFS has solved are also solved in BitTorrent v2, and BitTorrent v2 IMO solves these problems in a much better way (you can create "hybrid torrents" which allows a great deal of backwards compatibility with existing torrent software). This isn't a UX issue, but another thing that makes it hard for me to recommend IPFS to friends is the increasing association with "Web3" and cryptocurrency. I don't have any strong opinions on "Web3", but to many people, it's an instant deal-breaker.
- hot_gril 3y ago
  IPFS provides nice stable links to media, and there are HTTP->IPFS gateways if needed. That seems useful for embedding content on multiple apps/sites. Yeah it happens to fit NFTs particularly well, then again we all know what BitTorrent is known for. And yes I agree IPFS has some UI problems. Would BitTorrent also be suitable for hosting embeddable content? I haven't seen that yet. A magnet URL is mainly a file hash and doesn't seem to encode a particular peer server, kinda like IPFS. But every time I've torrented Ubuntu, it's taken half a minute just to find the peers.
  - mvdtnz 3y ago
    > IPFS provides nice stable links to media Anyone who has tried to torrent an old movie or lesser-known television show knows this is simply not true.
    - 3y ago
b_fiive 3y ago
Totally biased founder here, but I work on https://github.com/n0-computer/iroh https://github.com/n0-computer/iroh, a thing that started off as an IPFS implementation in rust, but we broke out & ended up doing our own thing. We're not at the point where the iroh implements "the full IPFS experience" (some parts border on impossible to do while keeping a decentralized promise), but we're getting closer to the "p2p website hosting" use case each week.
- hot_gril 3y ago
  Is it named after the Avatar character?
  - joshspankit 3y ago
    Yes, and that makes me happy every time I see it.
  - b_fiive 3y ago
    I can neither confirm nor deny, but oh boy does uncle iroh seem cool
- gabesullice 3y ago
  Super intriguing. Thanks for sharing! It reminds me a bit of an early Go project called Upspin [1]. And also a bit of Solid [2]. Did you take any inspiration from them? What excites me about your project is that you're addressing the elephant in the room when it comes to data sovereignty (~nobody wants to self-host a personal database but their personal devices aren't publicly accessible) in an elegant way. By storing the data on my personal device and (presumably?) paying for a managed relay (and maybe an encrypted backup), I can keep my data in my physical possession, but I won't have to host anything on my own. Is that the idea? [1] https://upspin.io/ https://upspin.io/ [2] https://solidproject.org/ https://solidproject.org/
  - b_fiive 3y ago
    Ah <3 Upspin! It's been a minute. I've personally read through & love Upspin. I always found solid a little too tied to RDF & the semantic web push. The solid project is/was super valiant effort, but these days I feel like the semantic web push peaked with HTML & schema.org. > By storing the data on my personal device and (presumably?) paying for a managed relay (and maybe an encrypted backup), I can keep my data in my physical possession, but I won't have to host anything on my own. Is that the idea? We're hoping to give that exact setup to app developers (maybe that's you :). We still have work to do on encryption at rest to keep the hosted server "dumb", and more plumbing into existing app development ecosystems like flutter, expo, tauri, etc. but yes, that's the hope. Give developers tools to ship apps that renegotiate the "user social contract".
axegon_ 3y ago
I see where the author is coming from but I find something else strange: Considering that the blog is in practice a collection of static files, I don't see the benefit of paying for a server at all. Host it on github, if github gets killed off for whatever reason, switch to something else and move on. Seems like an unnecessary overhead to me.
- hot_gril 3y ago
  Same. IPFS seems far more useful for hosting static content that might be embedded in multiple websites.
- neiman 3y ago
  I get told that a lot! xD My original aim was to write an IPFS blogging engine for my personal use, so I needed some dynamic loading from IPFS there. Now I switched to Jekyll, and it would be easier to host the blog on Github indeed, but I'm kind of playing a quixotic game of trying to minimize the presence of Google/Microsoft/Amazon and other big-tech in my life.
  - walterbell 3y ago
    Free tier of indie https://neocities.org https://neocities.org supports static sites like Jekyll.
    - rapnie 3y ago
      https://codeberg.page https://codeberg.page .. similar idea to Github Pages.
ChrisArchitect 3y ago
Aside: visited this curious as to what the Nieman Journalism Lab (https://www.niemanlab.org/ https://www.niemanlab.org/) was doing with IPFS if anything. Not the nicest near-collision naming move.
shp0ngle 3y ago
Yeah this is exactly my experience with IPFS. Nobody actually uses IPFS directly, and even those few that do never actually pin anything because it's an extra step. (Also I heard it's computationally costly, but I am not sure if it's true, I can't imagine why it would be the case actually.) As a result it's actually more centralised than web, there are like 3 pinning services that everyone uses. At which point I don't get the extra hoops.
filebase 3y ago
Did you try IPNS Names? - https://filebase.com/blog/unveiling-names-a-dive-into-ipns-on-filebase https://filebase.com/blog/unveiling-names-a-dive-into-ipns-o...
- neiman 3y ago
  Oh yes, I even had a free IPNS pinning service (for community members mostly) built with a friend. https://dwebservices.xyz/ https://dwebservices.xyz/
mbgerring 3y ago
Did they ever address the issue with IPFS where running a node necessarily required you to distribute an unknowable amount of pieces of material you may not want to be hosting (like CSAM, for example)?
- treyd 3y ago
  That has never been an issue. You only seed what you choose to. It's basically the same model as BitTorrent but with about 15 fewer years of R&D behind it and much less organic user adoption.
alucart 3y ago
I'm exploring a similar project, having a "decentralized" website (hosted on github) which saves users' data in the blockchain itself and then provides that same data to other users through public APIs and/or from actual blockchain clients. Wonder if there is actual use or need for such thing.
tempaccount1234 3y ago
As a user I’d stay away from sharing IPFS because of legal reasons. Just like torrenting, by actively distributing content I take up legal responsibility (at least in Europe where I’m located) - that’s risk is tolerable for a legal torrent because the file doesn’t change over time. For a changing web site, I’d constantly have to monitor the site for changes or trust the site 100% - which is not happening as soon as the site is somewhat controversial…
wyck 3y ago
I build a blog in IPFS, its basically reliant on several centralized services to actually work in browsers (DNS , GitHub, Fleek, etc). I wrote about how I build it here, the experaince was underwhelming. https://labcabin.eth.limo/writing/how-site-built.html https://labcabin.eth.limo/writing/how-site-built.html
mawise 3y ago
What about a cross between IPFS/Nostr and RSS? RSS (or atom) already provides a widely-adopted syndication structure. All that's missing are signatures so that a middleman can re-broadcast the same content. Maybe with signatures that's really reinventing SSB[1]. But if we think of the network in a more social sense, where you're connecting to trusted peers (think: irl friends), maybe the signatures aren't even that important. All that's left then is to separate the identifier for the feed from the location--today those are both URL--so you can fetch a feed from a non-authoritative peer. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Scuttlebutt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Scuttlebutt
deephire 3y ago
Any thoughts on the services that make hosting a blog on IPFS easier? Services like https://dappling.network https://dappling.network, https://spheron.network https://spheron.network, https://fleek.co https://fleek.co, etc? I've seen some DeFi protocols use IPFS to add some resiliency to their frontends. If their centralized frontend with vercel or whatever is down, they can direct users to their IPFS/ENS entrypoint.
fsiefken 3y ago
Perhaps use the DAT p2p network as an alternative? https://kovah.medium.com/publishing-a-static-website-to-the-dat-p2p-network-36f3516450b2 https://kovah.medium.com/publishing-a-static-website-to-the-...
dannyobrien 3y ago
I'm not sure quite how relevant it is to Neiman's work, but this is a pretty interesting blog post on decentralized web apps, and the tradeoffs with using various versions of IPFS in the browser: https://blog.ipfs.tech/dapps-ipfs/ https://blog.ipfs.tech/dapps-ipfs/
deleted 3y ago
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deleted 3y ago
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anacrolix 3y ago
For a BitTorrent based take on IPFS: https://GitHub.com/anacrolix/btlink https://GitHub.com/anacrolix/btlink
- Avamander 3y ago
  This seems significantly more viable than IPFS, if you can leverage all the existing available torrents out there.
fractalnetworks 3y ago
yup ipfs literally doesnt work, why else did they need to do an ico and introduce centralized indexers...
zubairq 3y ago
I did a similar thing on a project of mine where I used to use IPFS as the only long term storage layer on a project of mine. I still use IPFS but now I use it more as "long term unreliable storage". Note that I use IPFS without Filecoin or any external pinning services, instead chose to pin the content from my own server on regular basis. The current status is that I plan to bring back IPFS usage more in the future for my project, but will wait for the ecosystem to mature a bit more first with regards to libraries.
geokon 3y ago
"This is a huge difference from BitTorrent where the only way to get content is to run your own software, and when you download something you also share it, by default." As far as I understand this isn't a solved technical problem - but mostly a cultural quirk and probably just due to how the early torrent clients were configured There is for instance a major Chinese torrent client (that name escapes me) that doesn't seed by default - so the whole thing could have easily not worked. If IPFS clients don't seed by default then that kinda sounds like either a design mistake or a "culture problem" I've always wondered if there was a way to check if a client is reseeding (eg. request and download a bit from a different IP) and then blacklist them if they provide the data (or throttle them or something)
- wruza 3y ago
  They probably don’t seed by default for a good reason. While torrents aren’t inherently political unlike signal and others, their culture is close to “legal ussues”. As a seeder I respect that and that’s why I’m seeding to high ratios. For every seeder of a specific piece of content there are 10x (20x? 50x?) more people who cannot share it back. But if you want to fence them off, you can use private trackers with ul/dl ratio accounting.
hirako2000 3y ago
On the need to run a node, i have a little project to wrap the static site content with an IPFS node in JS. E.g there is already helia. https://github.com/ipfs/helia https://github.com/ipfs/helia Just waiting for running a node on the browser tab to become insignificant, resource wise.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
nikisweeting 3y ago
Is there anything that allows one to mount an IPFS dir as a read/write FUSE drive yet? Once they have that, I'm all in, even if it's slow...
- ianopolous 3y ago
  We have a FUSE mount in Peergos[0][1] (built on IPFS). It lets you mount any folder read or write (within your access). [0] https://github.com/peergos/peergos https://github.com/peergos/peergos [1] https://peergos.org https://peergos.org
- willscott 3y ago
  https://github.com/djdv/go-filesystem-utils/pull/40 https://github.com/djdv/go-filesystem-utils/pull/40 lets you interact with IPFS as an NFS mount
ianopolous 3y ago
I've been hosting my website on Peergos (built on ipfs) for years now (founder here). Peergos solves a lot of the issues with mutable data (also privacy, access control). You can see how fast updates show up from an independent server here: https://peergos.org/posts/p2p-web-hosting https://peergos.org/posts/p2p-web-hosting My personal website served from a peergos gateway (anyone can run one) is https://ianopolous.peergos.me/ https://ianopolous.peergos.me/ If you want to read more check out our book: https://book.peergos.org https://book.peergos.org
sharperguy 3y ago
I think the main difference between IPFS and bittorrent in terms of usage patterns is that IPFS is being used to host content that could easily by just a regular HTTP server, whereas bittorrent is hosting data which is highly desired and would be impossible or very expensive to host on HTTP. And so naturally relays pop up, and the relays end up being more convenient than actually using the underlying protocol.
- diggan 3y ago
  Key difference between a regular HTTP server and IPFS is that you can always try a different gateway/relay to get the very same content, and you can be sure it's the same. Cannot really do that with HTTP today as it's usually tied to locations, in one or another way.
xiaojay2022 3y ago
try planet https://github.com/Planetable/Planet https://github.com/Planetable/Planet
miga 3y ago
Did you try FileCoin instead?
t3estabc 3y ago
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t3estabc 3y ago
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330 points by neiman 3y ago

> I pinned content from my own server and played forever with settings and definitions, but couldn’t get the content to be available everywhere. > The blog you’re reading now is built with Jekyll and is hosted on my own 10$ server. > don’t get me wrong, I’m still an IPFS fanboy. ...how could you still be a fanboy? When IPFS cannot fulfill even the most basic function of globally serving static content, why does it deserve anyone's interest? It's not even new or cutting edge at this point. After 8 years of development how can the most basic functionality still not work for even an expert?

neiman 3y ago
It worked fine before for many years when it was slightly less popular. They're having growing pains due to scalability problems and some libraries, like Helia (the JS library of IPFS), being new. I guess I'm also quite stubborn in wanting to do it my way, without the aid of any services, and for the content I pin to be available in all places, including Helia in the browser.
- p4bl0 3y ago
  The official IPFS client in Go has always been very, very hungry for resources. At some point it crashed because it needed to many file descriptors if it ran for too long. Even for a simple static site with infrequent update it needed some maintenance. But even if one was willing to put the effort in, it was not actually rewarded, because if your server were you pin your website is offline, the truth is that your site is offline too, so what's the point?
withinboredom 3y ago
[wrong thread]
- TheRealPomax 3y ago
  What on earth are you talking about? IPFS has nothing to do with "coins", it's a distributed data management system. You can use IPFS for finance in the same way you can use a database for finance. You can also use IPFS for literally anything else that falls in the "data that you want other people to be able to access" category.
  - withinboredom 3y ago
    oh shit, I replied to the wrong comment.
  - nottorp 3y ago
    But it seems associated with blockchain and something named filecoin? There goes all credibility.
    - TheRealPomax 3y ago
      Yeah we've kind of been using the block chain since the end of the 15th century. Something using public "double" book keeping to ensure data integrity across a network (digital or otherwise) doesn't magically make that data a currency just because some Japanese guy's pet project became too popular for its own good =)
      - nottorp 3y ago
        Oh. Are you sure there aren't stone tables with block chain?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
heipei 3y ago
It's working fabulously for hosting phishing websites frontend by the popular IPFS gateway providers like Cloudflare, so at least there's that...

lindig 3y ago

Filecoin, which is based on IPFS, creates a market for unused storage. I think that idea is great but for adoption it needs to be as simple as Dropbox to store files. But visit https://filecoin.io/ https://filecoin.io/ and the dropbox-like app that you could be willing to try is nowhere to be found. So maybe it is an enterprise solution? That isn't spelled out either. So I am not surprised that this has little traction and the article further confirms the impression.

pierat 3y ago
Here's your $.10/day for that 1GB with bandwidth... but running the filecoin stack will cost you a $50/mo server. That fucker's a PIG on cpu and ram.
- kkielhofner 3y ago
  IPFS is as well. Clearly much more going on but take a machine that can serve 10k req/s with [insert 100 things here] without flinching and watch it maybe, just maybe, do 10 with IPFS. I'm not kidding.
diggan 3y ago
> to be as simple as Dropbox to store files. But visit https://filecoin.io/ https://filecoin.io/ and the dropbox-like app that you could be willing to try is nowhere to be found I agree with this fully. But as said elsewhere, it's kind of far away from that, and also slightly misdirected. Imagine asking someone to get started with web development by sending them to https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc793.txt https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc793.txt (the TCP specification). Filecoin is just the protocol, and won't ever solve that particular problem, as it's not focused on solving that particular problem, it's up to client implementations to solve. But the ecosystem is for sure missing an easy to use / end-user application like Dropbox for storing files in a decentralized and secure way.
poorman 3y ago
That flagship app you are looking for seems to be https://nft.storage/ https://nft.storage/ (by Protocol Labs).

p4bl0 3y ago

I'm surprised by the beginning of the post talking about pioneering in 2019. Maybe it is the case for ENS (I never cared for it), but regarding IPFS, my website was available over IPFS 3 years before that in 2016 [1]. Granted, I was never IPFS only. I also started publishing a series of article about censorship-resistant internet (Tor, I2P, IPFS, and ZeroNet) in 2600 Magazine – The Hacker Quarterly – back in 2017 [2]. Anyway, I came to the same conclusion as the author, but several years ago: in the end, nothing is actually decentralized, and maintaining this illusion of decentralization is actually costly, for no real purpose (other than the initial enjoyment of playing with a new tech, that is). So I stopped maintaining it a few years ago. That decision was also because of the growing involvement of some of these projects with blockchain tech that I never wanted to be a part of. This is also why I cancelled my article series in 2600 before publishing those on IPFS and ZeroNet. [1] See for example this archive of my HN profile page from 2016 with the link to it: https://web.archive.org/web/20161122210110/https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=p4bl0 https://web.archive.org/web/20161122210110/https://news.ycom... [2] https://pablo.rauzy.name/outreach.html#2600 https://pablo.rauzy.name/outreach.html#2600

neiman 3y ago
> Maybe it is the case for ENS Oh yeah, I was referring strictly to IPFS+ENS websites. I have been working with it for several years so my mind goes for this use-case automatically.
r3trohack3r 3y ago
> Anyway, I came to the same conclusion as the author, but several years ago: in the end, nothing is actually decentralized, and maintaining this illusion of decentralization is actually costly, for no real purpose (other than the initial enjoyment of playing with a new tech, that is). Do you have any writing (blog posts, HN comments, etc.) where you explore this thought more? I'm in the thick of building p2p software, very interested in what you came to know during that time.
- deleted 3y ago
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nonrandomstring 3y ago

Well done to the author for writing this up. Having tried fringe technologies over the years, spun up a server and run them for a few months, struggled and seen all the rough edges and loose threads, I often come to the point of feeling - this technology is good, but it's not ready yet. Time to let more determined people carry the torch. The upside is: - you tried, and so contributed to the ecosystem - you told people what needs improving Just quitting and not writing about your experience seems a waste for everyone, so good to know why web hosting on IPFS is still rough.

yieldcrv 3y ago

I host all the static files of my Netlify and Vercel servers on IPFS it is simple enough and free even on hosted solutions, and it keeps my Netlify and Vercel free during spikes in traffic but the availability issue is perplexing, just like OP encountered some people just randomly wont be able to resolve some assets on your site, sometimes! the gateways go up and down, their cache of your file comes and goes. browsers dont natively resolve ipfs:// uris. its very weird.

indigodaddy 3y ago
“ and it keeps my Netlify and Vercel free during spikes in traffic” — how exactly would this help re: potentially breaching outbound transfer limits?
- yieldcrv 3y ago
  if static assets arent being requested from their server then it would not contribute to your bandwidth meter
  - indigodaddy 3y ago
    You still have to transfer that data through the network pipe to the end user no? How the server itself accesses the files to do so seems irrelevant to me.
    - Drblessing 3y ago
      I think if the assets are served in the html from ipfs gateway, then it doesn't add to your outbound traffic. Also once browsers support natively ipfs:// static content the game changes and the IPFS party really gets started.

MenhirMike 3y ago

> the more readers it has, the faster it is to use it since some readers help to spread the content (Scalable). In other words: Once a few big websites are established, no small website will ever be able to gain traction again because the big websites are simply easier to reach and thus more attractive to use. And just like an unpopular old torrent, eventually you run out of seeders and your site is lost forever. One can argue about the value of low traffic websites, but I got to wonder: Who in their right mind thinks "Yeah, I want to make a website and then have others decide if it's allowed to live". Then again, maybe that kind of "survival of the fittest" is appealing to some folks. As far as I am concerned, it sounds like a stupid idea. (Which the author goes into more detail, so that's a good write up)

lelandbatey 3y ago
It's not up to others alone; you get a say too because you can seed your own content and that can be fast. In the worst case of no interest, then it's approximately the same as you hosting your own website in the world of today. This doesn't exonerate the shortfall of the "old torrent" pattern though, as you say.
fodkodrasz 3y ago
This is a false dilemma. Why would you not "seed" (pin) your own site, and be at others' mercy? You pin it, and when others also do so, the readers get faster and more redundant service.
- kimixa 3y ago
  For "unpopular" sites having a single origin somewhat removes the advantages of IPFS, it's not decentralized, not censorship resilient, and still costs the publisher for ongoing infrastructure to host it. Yet still had the disadvantages and complexity of IPFS vs a static http server. So if you're not going to be publishing something that will always have multiple copies floating around, why use IPFS?
  - fodkodrasz 3y ago

koito17 3y ago

> it’s quite an inconvenience to run your own IPFS node. But even if you do run your own node, the fact you access a website doesn’t mean you pin it. Not at all. This has always been my major UX gripe with IPFS. The fact that `ipfs add` in the command line does little but generate a hash and you need to actually pin things in order to "seed" them, so to speak. So "adding a file to IPFS", in the sense of "adding a file to the network", requires the user to know that (1) the "add" in `ipfs add` does not add a file to the network, and (2) you must pin everything you want to replicate manually. I remember as recently as 2021 having to manually pin each file in a directory since pinning the directory does not recursively pin files. Doing this by hand for small folders is okay, but large folders? Not so much. More importantly, the BitTorrent duplication problems that IPFS has solved are also solved in BitTorrent v2, and BitTorrent v2 IMO solves these problems in a much better way (you can create "hybrid torrents" which allows a great deal of backwards compatibility with existing torrent software). This isn't a UX issue, but another thing that makes it hard for me to recommend IPFS to friends is the increasing association with "Web3" and cryptocurrency. I don't have any strong opinions on "Web3", but to many people, it's an instant deal-breaker.

hot_gril 3y ago
IPFS provides nice stable links to media, and there are HTTP->IPFS gateways if needed. That seems useful for embedding content on multiple apps/sites. Yeah it happens to fit NFTs particularly well, then again we all know what BitTorrent is known for. And yes I agree IPFS has some UI problems. Would BitTorrent also be suitable for hosting embeddable content? I haven't seen that yet. A magnet URL is mainly a file hash and doesn't seem to encode a particular peer server, kinda like IPFS. But every time I've torrented Ubuntu, it's taken half a minute just to find the peers.
- mvdtnz 3y ago
  > IPFS provides nice stable links to media Anyone who has tried to torrent an old movie or lesser-known television show knows this is simply not true.
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b_fiive 3y ago

Totally biased founder here, but I work on https://github.com/n0-computer/iroh https://github.com/n0-computer/iroh, a thing that started off as an IPFS implementation in rust, but we broke out & ended up doing our own thing. We're not at the point where the iroh implements "the full IPFS experience" (some parts border on impossible to do while keeping a decentralized promise), but we're getting closer to the "p2p website hosting" use case each week.

hot_gril 3y ago
Is it named after the Avatar character?
- joshspankit 3y ago
  Yes, and that makes me happy every time I see it.
- b_fiive 3y ago
  I can neither confirm nor deny, but oh boy does uncle iroh seem cool
gabesullice 3y ago
Super intriguing. Thanks for sharing! It reminds me a bit of an early Go project called Upspin [1]. And also a bit of Solid [2]. Did you take any inspiration from them? What excites me about your project is that you're addressing the elephant in the room when it comes to data sovereignty (~nobody wants to self-host a personal database but their personal devices aren't publicly accessible) in an elegant way. By storing the data on my personal device and (presumably?) paying for a managed relay (and maybe an encrypted backup), I can keep my data in my physical possession, but I won't have to host anything on my own. Is that the idea? [1] https://upspin.io/ https://upspin.io/ [2] https://solidproject.org/ https://solidproject.org/
- b_fiive 3y ago
  Ah <3 Upspin! It's been a minute. I've personally read through & love Upspin. I always found solid a little too tied to RDF & the semantic web push. The solid project is/was super valiant effort, but these days I feel like the semantic web push peaked with HTML & schema.org. > By storing the data on my personal device and (presumably?) paying for a managed relay (and maybe an encrypted backup), I can keep my data in my physical possession, but I won't have to host anything on my own. Is that the idea? We're hoping to give that exact setup to app developers (maybe that's you :). We still have work to do on encryption at rest to keep the hosted server "dumb", and more plumbing into existing app development ecosystems like flutter, expo, tauri, etc. but yes, that's the hope. Give developers tools to ship apps that renegotiate the "user social contract".

axegon_ 3y ago

I see where the author is coming from but I find something else strange: Considering that the blog is in practice a collection of static files, I don't see the benefit of paying for a server at all. Host it on github, if github gets killed off for whatever reason, switch to something else and move on. Seems like an unnecessary overhead to me.

hot_gril 3y ago
Same. IPFS seems far more useful for hosting static content that might be embedded in multiple websites.
neiman 3y ago
I get told that a lot! xD My original aim was to write an IPFS blogging engine for my personal use, so I needed some dynamic loading from IPFS there. Now I switched to Jekyll, and it would be easier to host the blog on Github indeed, but I'm kind of playing a quixotic game of trying to minimize the presence of Google/Microsoft/Amazon and other big-tech in my life.
- walterbell 3y ago
  Free tier of indie https://neocities.org https://neocities.org supports static sites like Jekyll.
  - rapnie 3y ago
    https://codeberg.page https://codeberg.page .. similar idea to Github Pages.

ChrisArchitect 3y ago

Aside: visited this curious as to what the Nieman Journalism Lab (https://www.niemanlab.org/ https://www.niemanlab.org/) was doing with IPFS if anything. Not the nicest near-collision naming move.

shp0ngle 3y ago

Yeah this is exactly my experience with IPFS. Nobody actually uses IPFS directly, and even those few that do never actually pin anything because it's an extra step. (Also I heard it's computationally costly, but I am not sure if it's true, I can't imagine why it would be the case actually.) As a result it's actually more centralised than web, there are like 3 pinning services that everyone uses. At which point I don't get the extra hoops.

filebase 3y ago

Did you try IPNS Names? - https://filebase.com/blog/unveiling-names-a-dive-into-ipns-on-filebase https://filebase.com/blog/unveiling-names-a-dive-into-ipns-o...

neiman 3y ago
Oh yes, I even had a free IPNS pinning service (for community members mostly) built with a friend. https://dwebservices.xyz/ https://dwebservices.xyz/

mbgerring 3y ago

Did they ever address the issue with IPFS where running a node necessarily required you to distribute an unknowable amount of pieces of material you may not want to be hosting (like CSAM, for example)?

treyd 3y ago
That has never been an issue. You only seed what you choose to. It's basically the same model as BitTorrent but with about 15 fewer years of R&D behind it and much less organic user adoption.

alucart 3y ago

I'm exploring a similar project, having a "decentralized" website (hosted on github) which saves users' data in the blockchain itself and then provides that same data to other users through public APIs and/or from actual blockchain clients. Wonder if there is actual use or need for such thing.

tempaccount1234 3y ago

As a user I’d stay away from sharing IPFS because of legal reasons. Just like torrenting, by actively distributing content I take up legal responsibility (at least in Europe where I’m located) - that’s risk is tolerable for a legal torrent because the file doesn’t change over time. For a changing web site, I’d constantly have to monitor the site for changes or trust the site 100% - which is not happening as soon as the site is somewhat controversial…

wyck 3y ago

I build a blog in IPFS, its basically reliant on several centralized services to actually work in browsers (DNS , GitHub, Fleek, etc). I wrote about how I build it here, the experaince was underwhelming. https://labcabin.eth.limo/writing/how-site-built.html https://labcabin.eth.limo/writing/how-site-built.html

mawise 3y ago

What about a cross between IPFS/Nostr and RSS? RSS (or atom) already provides a widely-adopted syndication structure. All that's missing are signatures so that a middleman can re-broadcast the same content. Maybe with signatures that's really reinventing SSB[1]. But if we think of the network in a more social sense, where you're connecting to trusted peers (think: irl friends), maybe the signatures aren't even that important. All that's left then is to separate the identifier for the feed from the location--today those are both URL--so you can fetch a feed from a non-authoritative peer. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Scuttlebutt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Scuttlebutt

deephire 3y ago

Any thoughts on the services that make hosting a blog on IPFS easier? Services like https://dappling.network https://dappling.network, https://spheron.network https://spheron.network, https://fleek.co https://fleek.co, etc? I've seen some DeFi protocols use IPFS to add some resiliency to their frontends. If their centralized frontend with vercel or whatever is down, they can direct users to their IPFS/ENS entrypoint.

fsiefken 3y ago

Perhaps use the DAT p2p network as an alternative? https://kovah.medium.com/publishing-a-static-website-to-the-dat-p2p-network-36f3516450b2 https://kovah.medium.com/publishing-a-static-website-to-the-...

dannyobrien 3y ago

I'm not sure quite how relevant it is to Neiman's work, but this is a pretty interesting blog post on decentralized web apps, and the tradeoffs with using various versions of IPFS in the browser: https://blog.ipfs.tech/dapps-ipfs/ https://blog.ipfs.tech/dapps-ipfs/

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anacrolix 3y ago

For a BitTorrent based take on IPFS: https://GitHub.com/anacrolix/btlink https://GitHub.com/anacrolix/btlink

Avamander 3y ago
This seems significantly more viable than IPFS, if you can leverage all the existing available torrents out there.

fractalnetworks 3y ago

yup ipfs literally doesnt work, why else did they need to do an ico and introduce centralized indexers...

zubairq 3y ago

I did a similar thing on a project of mine where I used to use IPFS as the only long term storage layer on a project of mine. I still use IPFS but now I use it more as "long term unreliable storage". Note that I use IPFS without Filecoin or any external pinning services, instead chose to pin the content from my own server on regular basis. The current status is that I plan to bring back IPFS usage more in the future for my project, but will wait for the ecosystem to mature a bit more first with regards to libraries.

geokon 3y ago

"This is a huge difference from BitTorrent where the only way to get content is to run your own software, and when you download something you also share it, by default." As far as I understand this isn't a solved technical problem - but mostly a cultural quirk and probably just due to how the early torrent clients were configured There is for instance a major Chinese torrent client (that name escapes me) that doesn't seed by default - so the whole thing could have easily not worked. If IPFS clients don't seed by default then that kinda sounds like either a design mistake or a "culture problem" I've always wondered if there was a way to check if a client is reseeding (eg. request and download a bit from a different IP) and then blacklist them if they provide the data (or throttle them or something)

wruza 3y ago
They probably don’t seed by default for a good reason. While torrents aren’t inherently political unlike signal and others, their culture is close to “legal ussues”. As a seeder I respect that and that’s why I’m seeding to high ratios. For every seeder of a specific piece of content there are 10x (20x? 50x?) more people who cannot share it back. But if you want to fence them off, you can use private trackers with ul/dl ratio accounting.

hirako2000 3y ago

On the need to run a node, i have a little project to wrap the static site content with an IPFS node in JS. E.g there is already helia. https://github.com/ipfs/helia https://github.com/ipfs/helia Just waiting for running a node on the browser tab to become insignificant, resource wise.

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nikisweeting 3y ago

Is there anything that allows one to mount an IPFS dir as a read/write FUSE drive yet? Once they have that, I'm all in, even if it's slow...

ianopolous 3y ago
We have a FUSE mount in Peergos[0][1] (built on IPFS). It lets you mount any folder read or write (within your access). [0] https://github.com/peergos/peergos https://github.com/peergos/peergos [1] https://peergos.org https://peergos.org
willscott 3y ago
https://github.com/djdv/go-filesystem-utils/pull/40 https://github.com/djdv/go-filesystem-utils/pull/40 lets you interact with IPFS as an NFS mount

ianopolous 3y ago

I've been hosting my website on Peergos (built on ipfs) for years now (founder here). Peergos solves a lot of the issues with mutable data (also privacy, access control). You can see how fast updates show up from an independent server here: https://peergos.org/posts/p2p-web-hosting https://peergos.org/posts/p2p-web-hosting My personal website served from a peergos gateway (anyone can run one) is https://ianopolous.peergos.me/ https://ianopolous.peergos.me/ If you want to read more check out our book: https://book.peergos.org https://book.peergos.org

sharperguy 3y ago

I think the main difference between IPFS and bittorrent in terms of usage patterns is that IPFS is being used to host content that could easily by just a regular HTTP server, whereas bittorrent is hosting data which is highly desired and would be impossible or very expensive to host on HTTP. And so naturally relays pop up, and the relays end up being more convenient than actually using the underlying protocol.

diggan 3y ago
Key difference between a regular HTTP server and IPFS is that you can always try a different gateway/relay to get the very same content, and you can be sure it's the same. Cannot really do that with HTTP today as it's usually tied to locations, in one or another way.

xiaojay2022 3y ago

try planet https://github.com/Planetable/Planet https://github.com/Planetable/Planet

miga 3y ago

Did you try FileCoin instead?

t3estabc 3y ago

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