6 ms·

I never fully understood the use of ipfs/iroh for websites, but I really like the idea for data caching in data science packages. It makes me more sense to me

by chaxor 3y ago

I never fully understood the use of ipfs/iroh for websites, but I really like the idea for data caching in data science packages. It makes me more sense to me that someone would be much more willing to serve large databases and neural network weights that they actually use everyday, rather than 'that one guys website they went to that one time'. I'm very surprised it's not as popular, if not more popular to just have @iroh-memoize decorators everywhere in people's database ETL code. That's a better use case (sense the user has a vested interest in keeping the data up) than helping people host we sites.

wuiheerfoj 3y ago
Desci Labs (1) do something like this - papers and all the associated data (raw data, code, analyses, peer review comments) are published and linked together - along with all the citations to other papers - in a big DAG. I believe their data is stored in a p2p - it might interest you! 1. https://desci.com/ https://desci.com/
wharvle 3y ago
IMO the case for something like IPFS gets worse and worse the larger proportion of clients are on battery. This makes it a really poor choice for the modern, public Web, where a whole lot of traffic comes from mobile devices. Serving things that are mostly or nigh-exclusively used by machines connected to the power grid (and, ideally, great and consistent Internet connections) is a much better use case.
- kmeisthax 3y ago
  This is half the reason why P2P died in the late 2000s. Mobile clients need to leech off a server to function. The other reason why it died is privacy. Participating in a P2P network reveals your IP address, which can be used to get a subscriber address via DMCA subpoenas, which is how the RIAA, MPAA, and later Prenda Law attacked the shit out of Gnutella and BitTorrent. Centralized systems don't usually expose their users to legal risk like P2P does. I have to wonder: how does IPFS protect people from learning what websites I've been on, or have pinned, without compromising the security of the network?
  - BlueTemplar 3y ago
    How did it "die" in the late oughties, when FAIs were boasting about releasing routers with built-in NAS with torrent support in 2011, and projects like Popcorn Time only got popular in 2014 ?
    - anthk 3y ago
      A clueless gen-z user maybe, which was born with smartphones. On some media, ED2K and Nicotine+ (Soulseek network) it's the only way to fetch that content. Classical series/movies/comic books/special vinyl editions ripped into FLAC... those won't be at full FLAC/CBZ quality (high DPI png's) on YT/Spotify or whatever web site or APP for tablets.
      - kmeisthax 3y ago
        I misphrased my first sentence. P2P's legal uses died with mobile. For example, Microsoft spent a huge amount of time and money removing the P2P functionality in Skype, because nobody was going to tolerate the data cost and battery drain of running a superpeer in your pocket. Yes, people still use P2P for piracy. This is actually part of the problem, and why it was so easy for mobile to kill P2P. While P2P itself is legal, associations with piracy meant nobody was willing to use P2P, which meant nobody was going to invest the time or money into making mobile P2P work[0]. Tangent time: Have you ever wondered why we distribute online video through YouTube instead of BitTorrent? Remember, you could just put magnet links in RSS, there was even an RSS/BitTorrent combo client called Democracy[1] which was basically YouTube before YouTube. But a lot of corporate suits didn't want to touch BitTorrent in any capacity, even for things they intended to distribute for free, because of the piracy stink. YouTube was also ridden with piracy, but they cleaned up their act and brand with a bunch of automated moderation tools. So when online video became corporate, all the monetization and ads went to centralized platforms and not decentralized ones. And as all of this should have tipped you off by now, I'm not a "clueless gen-z user born with smartphones". Even if I was, Zoomers figure out this shit anyway, despite Apple and Google's attempts to starve their brains of oxygen by denying them access to real computers. [0] Yes, I know about AirDrop. AirDrop is just a taste of what we could have had if real engineering hours had gone into mobile P2P, instead of moving the few early adopters back onto centralized services. [1] This would later be renamed to Miro and then abandoned as their YouTube API integration broke. Yes, they were also NewPipe before NewPipe.

by chaxor 3y ago

wuiheerfoj 3y ago

Desci Labs (1) do something like this - papers and all the associated data (raw data, code, analyses, peer review comments) are published and linked together - along with all the citations to other papers - in a big DAG. I believe their data is stored in a p2p - it might interest you! 1. https://desci.com/ https://desci.com/

wharvle 3y ago

IMO the case for something like IPFS gets worse and worse the larger proportion of clients are on battery. This makes it a really poor choice for the modern, public Web, where a whole lot of traffic comes from mobile devices. Serving things that are mostly or nigh-exclusively used by machines connected to the power grid (and, ideally, great and consistent Internet connections) is a much better use case.

kmeisthax 3y ago
This is half the reason why P2P died in the late 2000s. Mobile clients need to leech off a server to function. The other reason why it died is privacy. Participating in a P2P network reveals your IP address, which can be used to get a subscriber address via DMCA subpoenas, which is how the RIAA, MPAA, and later Prenda Law attacked the shit out of Gnutella and BitTorrent. Centralized systems don't usually expose their users to legal risk like P2P does. I have to wonder: how does IPFS protect people from learning what websites I've been on, or have pinned, without compromising the security of the network?
- BlueTemplar 3y ago
  How did it "die" in the late oughties, when FAIs were boasting about releasing routers with built-in NAS with torrent support in 2011, and projects like Popcorn Time only got popular in 2014 ?
  - anthk 3y ago
    A clueless gen-z user maybe, which was born with smartphones. On some media, ED2K and Nicotine+ (Soulseek network) it's the only way to fetch that content. Classical series/movies/comic books/special vinyl editions ripped into FLAC... those won't be at full FLAC/CBZ quality (high DPI png's) on YT/Spotify or whatever web site or APP for tablets.
    - kmeisthax 3y ago
      I misphrased my first sentence. P2P's legal uses died with mobile. For example, Microsoft spent a huge amount of time and money removing the P2P functionality in Skype, because nobody was going to tolerate the data cost and battery drain of running a superpeer in your pocket. Yes, people still use P2P for piracy. This is actually part of the problem, and why it was so easy for mobile to kill P2P. While P2P itself is legal, associations with piracy meant nobody was willing to use P2P, which meant nobody was going to invest the time or money into making mobile P2P work[0]. Tangent time: Have you ever wondered why we distribute online video through YouTube instead of BitTorrent? Remember, you could just put magnet links in RSS, there was even an RSS/BitTorrent combo client called Democracy[1] which was basically YouTube before YouTube. But a lot of corporate suits didn't want to touch BitTorrent in any capacity, even for things they intended to distribute for free, because of the piracy stink. YouTube was also ridden with piracy, but they cleaned up their act and brand with a bunch of automated moderation tools. So when online video became corporate, all the monetization and ads went to centralized platforms and not decentralized ones. And as all of this should have tipped you off by now, I'm not a "clueless gen-z user born with smartphones". Even if I was, Zoomers figure out this shit anyway, despite Apple and Google's attempts to starve their brains of oxygen by denying them access to real computers. [0] Yes, I know about AirDrop. AirDrop is just a taste of what we could have had if real engineering hours had gone into mobile P2P, instead of moving the few early adopters back onto centralized services. [1] This would later be renamed to Miro and then abandoned as their YouTube API integration broke. Yes, they were also NewPipe before NewPipe.