4 ms·

They do torrents. I was looking into this recently as well, considering building an Activity Pub alternative to IA. I came to what I assume is the same conclusi

They do torrents. I was looking into this recently as well, considering building an Activity Pub alternative to IA. I came to what I assume is the same conclusion that IA came to. No one uses IPFS. For the average user, it is significantly more difficult to get started. For the experienced user, the ecosystem of tools around IPFS is extremely small. All in all, IPFS offers very little benefit over torrents in practice and has a much smaller user pool.

outside1234 1y ago
IPFS is a great idea poorly executed. Content addressable storage is a great idea, but it is so difficult to use in practice for real world scaled scenarios (larger than one hard disk drive).
kevincox 1y ago
The problems with the torrents is that they can be updated if the file changes (sometimes small metadata changes) and now your seeders can't be found. Maybe if they also kept a list of old hashes so that you could at least manually try to recover data from the older torrent?
- Lammy 1y ago
  This is outdated information. These issues have been solved by various BitTorrent Enhancement Proposals. You do create a new torrent, but you distribute it in a way that to a swarm member is functionally equivalent to updating an old torrent. Check out BEP-0039 and BEP-0046 which respectively cover the HTTP and DHT mechanisms for updating torrents: https://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0039.html https://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0039.html https://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0046.html https://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0046.html If that updated torrent is a BEP-0052 (v2) torrent it will hash per-file, and so the updated v2 torrent will have identical hashes for files which aren't changed: https://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0052.html https://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0052.html This combines with BEP-0038 so the updated torrent can refer to the infohash of the older torrents with which it shares files, so if you already have an old one you only have to download files that have changed: https://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0038.html https://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0038.html
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
    Have any of these even started to be implemented in any client/library? It's been years.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]

outside1234 1y ago

IPFS is a great idea poorly executed. Content addressable storage is a great idea, but it is so difficult to use in practice for real world scaled scenarios (larger than one hard disk drive).

kevincox 1y ago

The problems with the torrents is that they can be updated if the file changes (sometimes small metadata changes) and now your seeders can't be found. Maybe if they also kept a list of old hashes so that you could at least manually try to recover data from the older torrent?

Lammy 1y ago
This is outdated information. These issues have been solved by various BitTorrent Enhancement Proposals. You do create a new torrent, but you distribute it in a way that to a swarm member is functionally equivalent to updating an old torrent. Check out BEP-0039 and BEP-0046 which respectively cover the HTTP and DHT mechanisms for updating torrents: https://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0039.html https://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0039.html https://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0046.html https://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0046.html If that updated torrent is a BEP-0052 (v2) torrent it will hash per-file, and so the updated v2 torrent will have identical hashes for files which aren't changed: https://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0052.html https://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0052.html This combines with BEP-0038 so the updated torrent can refer to the infohash of the older torrents with which it shares files, so if you already have an old one you only have to download files that have changed: https://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0038.html https://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0038.html
- NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
  Have any of these even started to be implemented in any client/library? It's been years.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]