4 ms·

Is anyone still (or has anyone ever) used IPFS in production? I’m not talking about technology demos such as Wikipedia-on-IPFS (which indeed worked and was imp

Is anyone still (or has anyone ever) used IPFS in production? I’m not talking about technology demos such as Wikipedia-on-IPFS (which indeed worked and was impressive) but where IPFS is actually being relied on for some functionality.

pixel_popping 3mo ago
It's funny because even in Piracy, IPFS has never really taken off and that's a massive use case.
- frollogaston 3mo ago
  Also public key lists like what Whatsapp now publishes
- boramalper 3mo ago
  It slowly was taking off—e.g. Library Genesis on IPFS[0]—but then IPFS introduced Bad Bits Denylist [1] which killed it on arrival. [0] https://freeread.org/ipfs.html https://freeread.org/ipfs.html [1] https://badbits.dwebops.pub/ https://badbits.dwebops.pub/
  - RobotToaster 3mo ago
    Suddenly it looks a lot less decentralised.
    - throwaway8388 3mo ago
      Well, badbits are only enforced on the centralized http gateways. LibGen CIDs would still resolve fine using the DHT as the decentralised discovery mechanism
    - msm_ 3mo ago
      I don't know, it looks pretty decentralised to me? >The purpose of this list is to allow IPFS node operators (e.g. someone running a public IPFS gateway) to opt into not hosting previously flagged content. IPFS node operators, who are supposedly interested in hosting malicious content (and i2p-hosted phishings are a real problem) can OPT INTO using this list. In this case, I don't see how that's any problem for piracy - people can just use one of the bad/unfiltered nodes.
      - RobotToaster 3mo ago
        The fact that it's entirely binary, and they don't separate someone copying books from malware isn't helping that argument.
MattCruikshank 3mo ago
It doesn't seem like it's popular to put old game ROMs on IPFS...? And that surprises me...
- boramalper 3mo ago
  And why would you do that? As opposed to, say, distributing via BitTorrent or serving them using a good-old HTTP server? edit: Not opposed to the idea, just curious what makes you pick IPFS over the existing alternatives.
  - darkwater 3mo ago
    Maybe fear of Nintendo coming to bite you?
  - topgrain2 3mo ago
    The idea of simply mounting a filesystem and selecting from a list of titles which roms to download and add to your local games, unloading them and transparently re-downloading when you need to free up space, all without relying on a centralized host even for the file index, is pretty appealing. You can do similar things with torrents but it's not quite as "natural". Most of the emulator frontends I've seen are pretty against integrating this kind of ease-of-piracy stuff, though, accepting recognizing and filling in metadata for well-known roms, but not making it easy to integrate with remote libraries of roms... except tools that run on "hacked" consoles, which seem to love just giving you a list of games with a "tap A/X to pirate" UI.
    - boramalper 3mo ago
      > The idea of simply mounting a filesystem You can use fuse-btfs [0] for mounting torrents as filesystems! Last I checked it was a fairly mature piece of software so hopefully it doesn’t feel unnatural. [0] https://github.com/johang/btfs https://github.com/johang/btfs
    - Gigachad 3mo ago
      It's because that crosses the line of plausibly legal. In theory you could use an emulator with only titles you copied from your own physical copies which is legal. But if they implement a download mechanism it's clearly illegal. At any rate you can replicate the same thing by just hosting the ROMs on your own cloud storage and using something like macos virtual files which will do this transprent download/delete to manage storage.
errpunktjose 3mo ago
https://swap.cow.fi https://swap.cow.fi uses it for order metadata registering iirc
frollogaston 3mo ago
NFT artwork, if you count that. Briefly checked, the ones that were traded for the most were using IPFS rather than HTTP. But I also don't trust that these aren't self-wash sales (easy given the "NF" part), also NFTs are dumb.
- boramalper 3mo ago
  I don’t think NFTs (should) count: My first impressions of web3 by Moxie Marlinspike https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html
  - deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]
  - benatkin 3mo ago
    Moxie doesn't trash NFTs or Web3 in that article. He just points out some limitations of the ecosystem. Also, ipfs directly fixes one of the bigger issues: > Instead of storing the data on-chain, NFTs instead contain a URL that points to the data. If it's ipfs, it points to the content. If it's ipns, it points to a changeable link to the content, but one that is made consistent through the network, preventing the trick of making it differ based on the referrer.
    - frollogaston 3mo ago
      I still don't count it because NFTs have seemingly died off in popularity. If there were tons of money staying in NFTs, regardless of how silly I think it is, I'd consider that an important use case of IPFS.
      - benatkin 3mo ago
        I don't think it matters if it's silly. I think it's highly successful, and that the success is continued. CryptoPunks is a clear example of genuine use of NFTs that still is an elite thing today, but another example is needed. I'll use this: if you go to Bored Apes and sort by recently sold, and look through them, you can see that there would have to be a lot of manipulation to have them rated in quality like they are. It just isn't plausible to me that a huge amount of those are self-dealing. If people were self-dealing, there would be a bunch of less cool ones with high prices, in order to try and get people to pay more for them. https://opensea.io/collection/boredapeyachtclub?sortDirection=desc&sortBy=last_sale_date https://opensea.io/collection/boredapeyachtclub?sortDirectio...
Borg3 3mo ago
Yeah.. IPFS is a bit disappointement. I was a bit exceited about it back in the day. Recently, I wanted to download sth large from archive.org, I used torrent (and my legacy torrent client) and it worked like a charm! It seems pure HTTP tracker + Torrent is good enough.
- boramalper 3mo ago
  I think the biggest sin of IPFS is not working natively in web browsers—instead, requiring the use of either HTTP gateways or native apps running outside the browser.
  - dannyobrien 3mo ago
    Actually, this works now! https://inbrowser.link/ https://inbrowser.link/ https://github.com/ipfs/service-worker-gateway https://github.com/ipfs/service-worker-gateway -- getting p2p working in browsers is still surprisingly hard: even the official routes like webrtc have lots of hard edge cases.
    - Borg3 3mo ago
      Comment there made me chuckle..: serving only small static HTML+JS files (<10MiB) sigh So entire IPFS + IPFS Gateway needs to be so huge? 10MB? My dot.exe (DVFS repo manager) is 150kB..
ydj 3mo ago
At meta, there was a project for delivering binaries of internally built libraries / binaries to dev laptops using a private ipfs network. This was live for at least some period of time.
- boramalper 3mo ago
  Very interesting! I wonder if it’s still live and there is any writing on it?
  - deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]
  - ydj 3mo ago
    Not sure, there was a lot of complaints when it rolled out because it was actually peer to peer syncing to other laptops which was causing bandwidth issues for people working on vpn, from planes etc. I’m not sure if it was actually a well thought out idea, since it’s not like fb has a lack of servers or bandwidth, but I didn’t work on it, so I don’t want to throw too much shade at it.
ValdikSS 3mo ago
I use it for about 5 years, to publish javascript file (proxy auto-configuration) and serve the contents over different gateways. It is a huge server traffic saver. Used to use it to host different static websites on custom domains while Cloudflare's gateway was working, stopped using it for this purpose since its sunset in 2024. Neocities used to publish their websites over IPFS, this feature got broken (for years) and finally got removed: https://github.com/neocities/neocities/issues/352 https://github.com/neocities/neocities/issues/352
- ValdikSS 3mo ago
  Also used it several times for almost-live video broadcasts, served over cloudflare ipfs gateway while it was working. It used HLS with .ts files, in a special way which circumvented cloudflare protection against .mp4 and .ts files, or something along the lines. Don't remember the details, but it was a cheap way to deliver your stream to any video player using standard protocols only.
preisschild 3mo ago
the containerd stargz snapshotter has an IPFS integration so you can use IPFS instead of a traditional OCI registry to store your OCI containers Not using it in production but i found it pretty cool to test
phae 3mo ago
the thing that prevented me using ipfs in anger.. (granted i may not have looked hard enough) was that i couldn't have stuff in ipfs, and access it via posix filesystem at he same time. i'd have to store things twice. fine for publishing, but not for having a live data set that is both used and published at the same time, as you can do with torrent.
- preisschild 3mo ago
  > was that i couldn't have stuff in ipfs, and access it via posix filesystem at he same time. Maybe this is possible to implement using fuse/9p fs
OneDeuxTriSeiGo 3mo ago
It's not literally IPFS but atproto/bluesky is using most of the bones of IPFS (IPLD) to do their entire data propagation and event broadcasting. And tbh it shouldn't be terribly difficult to extend the existing infra to supporting a full IPFS based system but I don't think anybody has considered it worthwhile yet. ATproto uses just the bits it immediately needs even if it could probably benefit from the other parts long term (ex for archival relay stream preservation).
bergie 3mo ago
Back when I was working at a website builder, we used IPFS for distributing content between our serving clusters. If also made the sites available on IPFS, but that was a secondary concern.

pixel_popping 3mo ago

It's funny because even in Piracy, IPFS has never really taken off and that's a massive use case.

frollogaston 3mo ago
Also public key lists like what Whatsapp now publishes
boramalper 3mo ago
It slowly was taking off—e.g. Library Genesis on IPFS[0]—but then IPFS introduced Bad Bits Denylist [1] which killed it on arrival. [0] https://freeread.org/ipfs.html https://freeread.org/ipfs.html [1] https://badbits.dwebops.pub/ https://badbits.dwebops.pub/
- RobotToaster 3mo ago
  Suddenly it looks a lot less decentralised.
  - throwaway8388 3mo ago
    Well, badbits are only enforced on the centralized http gateways. LibGen CIDs would still resolve fine using the DHT as the decentralised discovery mechanism
  - msm_ 3mo ago
    I don't know, it looks pretty decentralised to me? >The purpose of this list is to allow IPFS node operators (e.g. someone running a public IPFS gateway) to opt into not hosting previously flagged content. IPFS node operators, who are supposedly interested in hosting malicious content (and i2p-hosted phishings are a real problem) can OPT INTO using this list. In this case, I don't see how that's any problem for piracy - people can just use one of the bad/unfiltered nodes.
    - RobotToaster 3mo ago
      The fact that it's entirely binary, and they don't separate someone copying books from malware isn't helping that argument.

MattCruikshank 3mo ago

It doesn't seem like it's popular to put old game ROMs on IPFS...? And that surprises me...

boramalper 3mo ago
And why would you do that? As opposed to, say, distributing via BitTorrent or serving them using a good-old HTTP server? edit: Not opposed to the idea, just curious what makes you pick IPFS over the existing alternatives.
- darkwater 3mo ago
  Maybe fear of Nintendo coming to bite you?
- topgrain2 3mo ago
  The idea of simply mounting a filesystem and selecting from a list of titles which roms to download and add to your local games, unloading them and transparently re-downloading when you need to free up space, all without relying on a centralized host even for the file index, is pretty appealing. You can do similar things with torrents but it's not quite as "natural". Most of the emulator frontends I've seen are pretty against integrating this kind of ease-of-piracy stuff, though, accepting recognizing and filling in metadata for well-known roms, but not making it easy to integrate with remote libraries of roms... except tools that run on "hacked" consoles, which seem to love just giving you a list of games with a "tap A/X to pirate" UI.
  - boramalper 3mo ago
    > The idea of simply mounting a filesystem You can use fuse-btfs [0] for mounting torrents as filesystems! Last I checked it was a fairly mature piece of software so hopefully it doesn’t feel unnatural. [0] https://github.com/johang/btfs https://github.com/johang/btfs
  - Gigachad 3mo ago
    It's because that crosses the line of plausibly legal. In theory you could use an emulator with only titles you copied from your own physical copies which is legal. But if they implement a download mechanism it's clearly illegal. At any rate you can replicate the same thing by just hosting the ROMs on your own cloud storage and using something like macos virtual files which will do this transprent download/delete to manage storage.

errpunktjose 3mo ago

https://swap.cow.fi https://swap.cow.fi uses it for order metadata registering iirc

frollogaston 3mo ago

NFT artwork, if you count that. Briefly checked, the ones that were traded for the most were using IPFS rather than HTTP. But I also don't trust that these aren't self-wash sales (easy given the "NF" part), also NFTs are dumb.

boramalper 3mo ago
I don’t think NFTs (should) count: My first impressions of web3 by Moxie Marlinspike https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
- benatkin 3mo ago
  Moxie doesn't trash NFTs or Web3 in that article. He just points out some limitations of the ecosystem. Also, ipfs directly fixes one of the bigger issues: > Instead of storing the data on-chain, NFTs instead contain a URL that points to the data. If it's ipfs, it points to the content. If it's ipns, it points to a changeable link to the content, but one that is made consistent through the network, preventing the trick of making it differ based on the referrer.
  - frollogaston 3mo ago
    I still don't count it because NFTs have seemingly died off in popularity. If there were tons of money staying in NFTs, regardless of how silly I think it is, I'd consider that an important use case of IPFS.
    - benatkin 3mo ago
      I don't think it matters if it's silly. I think it's highly successful, and that the success is continued. CryptoPunks is a clear example of genuine use of NFTs that still is an elite thing today, but another example is needed. I'll use this: if you go to Bored Apes and sort by recently sold, and look through them, you can see that there would have to be a lot of manipulation to have them rated in quality like they are. It just isn't plausible to me that a huge amount of those are self-dealing. If people were self-dealing, there would be a bunch of less cool ones with high prices, in order to try and get people to pay more for them. https://opensea.io/collection/boredapeyachtclub?sortDirection=desc&sortBy=last_sale_date https://opensea.io/collection/boredapeyachtclub?sortDirectio...

Borg3 3mo ago

Yeah.. IPFS is a bit disappointement. I was a bit exceited about it back in the day. Recently, I wanted to download sth large from archive.org, I used torrent (and my legacy torrent client) and it worked like a charm! It seems pure HTTP tracker + Torrent is good enough.

boramalper 3mo ago
I think the biggest sin of IPFS is not working natively in web browsers—instead, requiring the use of either HTTP gateways or native apps running outside the browser.
- dannyobrien 3mo ago
  Actually, this works now! https://inbrowser.link/ https://inbrowser.link/ https://github.com/ipfs/service-worker-gateway https://github.com/ipfs/service-worker-gateway -- getting p2p working in browsers is still surprisingly hard: even the official routes like webrtc have lots of hard edge cases.
  - Borg3 3mo ago
    Comment there made me chuckle..: serving only small static HTML+JS files (<10MiB) sigh So entire IPFS + IPFS Gateway needs to be so huge? 10MB? My dot.exe (DVFS repo manager) is 150kB..

ydj 3mo ago

At meta, there was a project for delivering binaries of internally built libraries / binaries to dev laptops using a private ipfs network. This was live for at least some period of time.

boramalper 3mo ago
Very interesting! I wonder if it’s still live and there is any writing on it?
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
- ydj 3mo ago
  Not sure, there was a lot of complaints when it rolled out because it was actually peer to peer syncing to other laptops which was causing bandwidth issues for people working on vpn, from planes etc. I’m not sure if it was actually a well thought out idea, since it’s not like fb has a lack of servers or bandwidth, but I didn’t work on it, so I don’t want to throw too much shade at it.

ValdikSS 3mo ago

I use it for about 5 years, to publish javascript file (proxy auto-configuration) and serve the contents over different gateways. It is a huge server traffic saver. Used to use it to host different static websites on custom domains while Cloudflare's gateway was working, stopped using it for this purpose since its sunset in 2024. Neocities used to publish their websites over IPFS, this feature got broken (for years) and finally got removed: https://github.com/neocities/neocities/issues/352 https://github.com/neocities/neocities/issues/352

ValdikSS 3mo ago
Also used it several times for almost-live video broadcasts, served over cloudflare ipfs gateway while it was working. It used HLS with .ts files, in a special way which circumvented cloudflare protection against .mp4 and .ts files, or something along the lines. Don't remember the details, but it was a cheap way to deliver your stream to any video player using standard protocols only.

preisschild 3mo ago

the containerd stargz snapshotter has an IPFS integration so you can use IPFS instead of a traditional OCI registry to store your OCI containers Not using it in production but i found it pretty cool to test

phae 3mo ago

the thing that prevented me using ipfs in anger.. (granted i may not have looked hard enough) was that i couldn't have stuff in ipfs, and access it via posix filesystem at he same time. i'd have to store things twice. fine for publishing, but not for having a live data set that is both used and published at the same time, as you can do with torrent.

preisschild 3mo ago
> was that i couldn't have stuff in ipfs, and access it via posix filesystem at he same time. Maybe this is possible to implement using fuse/9p fs

OneDeuxTriSeiGo 3mo ago

It's not literally IPFS but atproto/bluesky is using most of the bones of IPFS (IPLD) to do their entire data propagation and event broadcasting. And tbh it shouldn't be terribly difficult to extend the existing infra to supporting a full IPFS based system but I don't think anybody has considered it worthwhile yet. ATproto uses just the bits it immediately needs even if it could probably benefit from the other parts long term (ex for archival relay stream preservation).

bergie 3mo ago

Back when I was working at a website builder, we used IPFS for distributing content between our serving clusters. If also made the sites available on IPFS, but that was a secondary concern.