6 ms·

IPFS Maintainers Winding Down

363 points by iand 1mo ago

tylergetsay 1mo ago
Has anyone looked at ar.io and have any opinions on it? They claim you are paying for 200 years upfront with a kind of endowment like setup.
- tancop 1mo ago
  Arweave does what it's designed for right now. When cyberleek came out I went looking for a gateway that wasn't censoring them, found one and downloaded the files using another gateway just to find out if it works (yes it did). You can't do that with a centralized system. For the endowment setup no one knows if their economic thinking will hold up 100 or even 10 years in the future, so the claims that it's permanent are impossible to verify. I wouldn't call it a scam but I'm not fully convinced.
zeckalpha 1mo ago
I have thought IPFS (or something like it) could provide a solution to ongoing scraping woes.
Macha 1mo ago
All those NFT holders where the NFT resolved to a ipfs.io link in shambles
- timcobb 1mo ago
  Hahaha thanks for this. It's ok, the asset is the block chain entry duh
  - bigbuppo 1mo ago
    All my apes gone.
    - timcobb 1mo ago
      Gone but not forgotten
  - yieldcrv 1mo ago
    all the NFTs I launched actually were fully onchain SVGs and CSS tried to be the change I wanted to see given where the concept actually found staying power (liquidity pools, instead of collectibles) it wholly needs a new name “NFT” is distracting at this point, they should just called them 721-structs so people don’t get distracted by the fumbled poorly implemented art use case
    - jMyles 1mo ago
      Yeah, when we do NFT ticketing these days, we just say, "have your 1155 ready" with a link to explain what that means. I still think it's pretty obvious that on sufficiently long time-scales that some variant of NFTs will be the winner for event tickets.
      - simonw 1mo ago
        What advantage does blockchain ticketing hold over a centralized database of tickets?
        frollogaston 1mo ago
        Resale on third-party markets. Centralized is probably good enough for them though.
        yieldcrv 1mo ago
        despite the "non fungible" in the name, tickets in this format ironically adds fungibility that non-blockchain marketplaces decrease right now outside of the web3 space, all promotion companies release tickets in different ways. the ability to resell them is unknown, the quantity for sale is unknown and opaque, the service fees make no sense for the last 20 years, the ability to transfer them is unknown, and the ability to lose your money on an attempted resale transaction is absurdly high. in comparison, all NFTs in the blockchain space inherit solutions to all of those problems and all marketplaces are just UI's on top of data already there in a uniform way, alongside new problems that are mostly education based and won't be solved with a different user experience (akin to how debit and credit cards introduced new problems with automated teller machines many decades ago, that never were solved but didn't deter the concept) can a centralized marketplace and issuer that conforms solve all of it? of course, but that hasn't been the rubric for nearly a decade.... developing in the blockchain space isn't to attract non-blockchain users - at least for anything that actually earns revenue - its solving frictions for existing blockchain users because they are there, numerous and its lucrative it's a parallel economy that you either accept the existence of or you don't, there are a lot of people trying to act like it has merged with other economies or asking you to use a big stake of money on blockchain assets with the hope that it becomes a bigger stake of money if they did merge, but that's really a distraction that has little to do with what's already happened and functioning fine
  - 0x457 1mo ago
    The checksum of the asset is on the blockchain. the asset is somewhere else.
    - timcobb 1mo ago
      Hmm I thought the asset is the block chain entry because that's what you have the key to, that you can re-sell to someone else. It's like crypto, no?
      - uproarchat 1mo ago
        The asset is more akin to a deed or a claim. Most NFTs are images hosted on S3 or IPFS. The blockchain entry is metadata with a pointer to the hosted asset.
        jdiff 1mo ago
        The NFT is the metadata. The metadata is the token that cannot be funged. The image is a wholly separate thing that a token points at, and multiple tokens can point at the same thing just fine. NFTs be be funge-free but images are fully fungible.
        Macha 1mo ago
        The value of the deed is it being backed by the legal system as proof of your ownership, up to potentially being enforced with government use of physical force.
        0x457 1mo ago
        [flagged]
- neoncontrails 1mo ago
  I know you jest, but both the IPFS contributors I knew in college graduated to become web3 degens working on decentralized file storage projects. Specifically Walrus, which grew out of Meta's Libra project.
- api 1mo ago
  Finding out NFTs were just links, didn't even embed the asset, was such a moment for me... like either the people pushing this are complete fools or 100% conscious grifters who know it's total bullshit. I suspect it was a mix. Insane. I think a lot of the AI skepticism comes from the fact that the last major New Thing (tm) pushed by this industry was crypto. People are very, very burned by that. That and how badly social media turned out, but that's a whole different discourse.
  - grebc 1mo ago
    Crypto / AI, it’s the same people. Same grift for other people’s money in the form of equity.
  - Ekaros 1mo ago
    Even more so when in most cases no one could explain any real type of ownership in terms of working in most existing legal frameworks. What would I have owned exactly? What would have ownership entitled... All very reasonable question. Mostly entirely ignored or handwaved...
    - inigyou 1mo ago
      In the case of the bay area yacht club you would have owned the right to be a member of the yacht club
      - frollogaston 1mo ago
        So they have a cool club for yachting but ruin it with geeky digital tokens
        inigyou 1mo ago
        Well, the yacht club failed and it was all just a money grab in the end.
  - JuniperMesos 1mo ago
    An NFT doesn't have to be just a link; nothing in principle stops someone creating a NFT that stores the full bytes of some digital asset directly on the blockchain, just as nothing in principle stops someone from creating a NFT that doesn't do this (or equivalently, a NFT whose on-chain content is simply a text hyperlink to something). The Bitcoin Ordinals concept of Inscriptions (https://docs.ordinals.com/inscriptions.html https://docs.ordinals.com/inscriptions.html), which is an attempt to build a NFT system for Bitcoin, does culturally encourage placing the bytes of a digital asset into the Bitcoin blockchain, and the tooling around it assumes this model; but again nothing prevents someone from creating an Inscription whose contents are simply a link to something else. And of course there's no reason why a NFT has to be used to represent ownership of some kind of digital art - there are other uses for NFTs, such as modeling transferable network permissions or resources. Ultimately NFTs are a just a specific application of blockchain technology, to represent some kind of resource on a blockchain which could in principle be digital art. If people care about ownership of NFTs representing digital art, that's a social fact about what kinds of art there is market demand for; and whether it matters that the bytes of the digital art are on a blockchain or linked from somewhere else (where they could get taken down or bitrot) is also a social fact. I actually agree that treating NFTs that merely contain a link to some bytes elsewhere that worked at one point in time is a pretty dumb thing to care about, or have a market for (and the use cases for NFTs where the bytes are actually on-chain are, at best, fairly limited, although I wouldn't say completely nonexistent). And certainly the NFT market of 2021 or so, which had a lot of such NFTs, was driven by a weird social mania and people attempting to grift upon that social mania. This has never bothered me though, because I feel the same way about many markets for physical pieces of art; and ultimately it needs to be possible for people to create markets for things I personally think are dumb or at least don't care about.
- frollogaston 1mo ago
  Why not just use the IPFS hash?
  - Macha 1mo ago
    This sounds like a smart idea. That's probably why the NFT hype train didn't do it.
    - frollogaston 1mo ago
      Looks like at least some of the valuable ones did though. The json payload is on ipfs, then the image url is ipfs://. Example: https://bafybeihpjhkeuiq3k6nqa3fkgeigeri7iebtrsuyuey5y6vy36n345xmbi.ipfs.inbrowser.link/645 https://bafybeihpjhkeuiq3k6nqa3fkgeigeri7iebtrsuyuey5y6vy36n... (they stored an ipfs hash only, this link is just a random viewer pointed at it) Btw it's weirdly annoying to get the json payload for one of these
ruined 1mo ago
has protocol labs itself made any kind of announcement? i don't see anything on the blog
- chriswarbo 1mo ago
  Just checked protocol labs site and... holy shit: > Protocol Labs is an innovation network driving breakthroughs in computing to push humanity forward. PL connects more than 750 tech startups, funds, accelerators, foundations, open source projects, service providers, and other organizations. What happened to them? Seems like they drank their own "Web3" Fla-Vor-Aid.
devttyeu 1mo ago
Sad to see it go having been a maintainer some years ago. For anyone wondering, there are more sustainable (with a viable, focused business backing the project) options to do p2p, namely Iroh - https://www.iroh.computer/ https://www.iroh.computer/ which was built by ex-IPFS ex-Protocol Labs devs (I have no relation to the team beyond having worked with them back in the day). Sadly Protocol Labs is doing.. ehh whatever now, except apparently supporting the projects it got its VC/crypto funding from.
- CommanderData 1mo ago
  I love Iroh but it doesn't quite work the same as IPFS if I understand correctly.
  - knowaveragejoe 1mo ago
    It doesn't, it's a lower level primitive. But things like IPFS can be built on top of it.
  - 2color 1mo ago
    The way I would put is as: Iroh + iroh-blobs == libp2p + UnixFS + Bitswap, and the latter three are some of the critical components that have defined most IPFS implementations.
  - rklaehn 1mo ago
    If you want to compare iroh with something out of the IPFS world, iroh is basically "what if you build libp2p on multipath QUIC". If you want full ipfs functionality, we have a number of protocols you can combine: blobs https://github.com/n0-computer/iroh-blobs https://github.com/n0-computer/iroh-blobs and gossip https://github.com/n0-computer/iroh-gossip https://github.com/n0-computer/iroh-gossip . There is one thing we do not have yet - global content discovery. The reason for this is that so far we have not found a way to do it in a way that just works. It is a very hard problem, but I hope we can come up with a solution so we can cover the use cases that initially got me excited about IPFS many years ago.
    - 1mo ago
rhodey 1mo ago
This is really unfortunate. When cloudflare dropped IPFS you could say this next step was sort of already on the way. I may be biased but I think when IPFS decided to put so much time into "IPNS" in order to support non-static webapps years ago what they came up with did not fit the need. And without webapps on IPFS things were going nowhere. A year or so ago I wrote IPFS-boot which allows serving webapps on IPFS while providing also an update path and without breaking content hashing: https://github.com/rhodey/IPFS-boot https://github.com/rhodey/IPFS-boot But now if you want to serve a secure webapp and not use IPFS IMO the only option you have is to tell users to install Tailscale and to host the webapp themselves and then to install Tailscale on all devices.
- toomuchtodo 1mo ago
  I see this very similar to IPv4 and IPv6, and adoption. Non content addressable URL addressing simply is "good enough" for most use cases, and bittorrent is "good enough" for serving content durably and somewhat in a content addressable manner (file hashes, magnet torrents, immutable torrents). Do we need IPFS URLs? It doesn't appear so, it seems like a solution seeking a problem. IPFS gateways will always be a target for abuse and copyright claims as well. If you want to reference resources securely, https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Security/Defenses/Subresource_Integrity https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Security/Defens... is available and widely supported.
  - rhodey 1mo ago
    I think something like IPFS is definitely needed. There is nothing stopping you from distributing a webapp on bittorrent but you'll also need to add a README for instructions on how to run the webapp on localhost so a browser can render it. So thats not something that any non-technical user wants to do.
    - toomuchtodo 1mo ago
      Can you share potential webapp use cases that would rely on IPFS or using IPFS for referencing resources would be an improvement? Perhaps my mental has gaps on this topic, and my thoughts and assertions could be incorrect.
its-summertime 1mo ago
Kubo, Helia, Boxo, Rainbow, IPFS Desktop, IPFS Companion, Someguy, Service Worker Gateway, IPFS Check, libp2p, ipfs.io, dweb.link, check.ipfs.network, delegated-ipfs.dev, Wikipedia-on-IPFS. It kinda feels like the AWS or Azure of file distribution, so much stuff so confusing. Also apparently with Protocol Labs owning several of those things despite not operating those things? Ironically seems quite a fragile setup. Regardless, very sad news.
mikert89 1mo ago
Does IPFS actually have users? I remeber when they raised 270 million and a bunch of people there got wildly wealthy
- dewey 1mo ago
  The only place where I regularly stumble upon on it was/is on libgen.
- runarberg 1mo ago
  Wait are you telling me yet another supposedly ground breaking technology turned out to be yet another grift. I know a lot of people on HN are going to call me overly cynical. But this pattern should be so obvious by now. Any cynicism to any new ground breaking technology which is gonna solve a problem that exists because of capitalism, that this cynicism is more than warranted. At this point we should all be cynical of any new technology.
  - dgellow 1mo ago
    Yeah, I now understand why gray beards are seen as grumpy. Mine isn’t gray yet, but after the 2010s and half of 2020s I can only see as very suspicious any new technology pushed hard by the industry
  - deleted 1mo ago
    [deleted]
  - int_19h 1mo ago
    New technology has always benefitted first and foremost those in power, simply because people who get to extract wealth from the rest of society can then direct that wealth to acquire new tech first. This was equally true in pre-capitalist societies, or in USSR for that matter. Being cynical about the tech itself is a bridge to nowhere, though, because it does not preclude its existence or usage, it just cuts you away from any benefits that you can personally get out of it - but you're still affected by all the downsides. Don't be cynical about tech. Be angry at the people who want to own it all and use it to exploit you.
- 1mo ago
gritzko 1mo ago
I can not say IPFS was a bad idea. Consider GitHub: it is a massive content-addressed store with a smiley on it. There has been some very hot P2P products, e.g. Tailscale. Protocol Labs had its peak during/after the ICO, but long-term, (1) they did not focus on some particular audience and (2) performance of the network was not great. I personally believe that their bet on DHT was not the right one (I worked in this area long before IPFS btw). OK, in retrospect we are all wise.
- anacrolix 1mo ago
  I worked on their DHT and it was broken from the start, and they didn't want to hear how to fix it. What would I know.
rvz 1mo ago
Another shut down post which many of its users did not support the maintainers. You are going to see a lot more shutdown posts around decentralized or federated technologies if you do not support those tools.
- dgellow 1mo ago
  There are close to no users of IPFS
- its-summertime 1mo ago
  Protocol Labs owned significant parts of the infrastructure. Regardless of community support, PL leaving would always be damaging.
ThatNodeKid 1mo ago
[flagged]
deleted 1mo ago
[deleted]
jMyles 1mo ago
I publish all of my music in ways that are pirate-friendly, which for the moment just means Bit Torrent and IPFS. See: https://pickipedia.xyz/wiki/Cryptograss:Delivery-kid https://pickipedia.xyz/wiki/Cryptograss:Delivery-kid If IPFS is starting to wane, does anyone else have a suggestion of a replacement about which I might start to educate my fans?
- haunter 1mo ago
  See I thought if IPFS was picked up by the piracy scene (some bigger private trackers for example) then it probably would have been more successful. Alas I haven't seen it outside of libgen and even there I thought it was a backup option only.
  - hiccuphippo 1mo ago
    I always thought it could be the evolution of Bittorrent: updatable torrents (with IPNS), peers sharing files from different "bundles" as long as the bits match. The problem was that there was no good client for it that was better than current torrent clients. When I tested it you had to keep a duplicate of the files in the ipfs cache directory and the client was CLI based which would alienate most users. There's probably no way to have private trackers or to track seed/leech ratios for communities too.
    - fwip 1mo ago
      It was also pretty slow (download rate wise), even if the destination and source node had a good link between them. I think the protocol had a lot of back-and-forth chatter, requesting blocks a few a time.
  - tancop 1mo ago
    Arweave on the other hand will be getting some traction from the GTA 6 leaker. It's not good for all use cases because you need to buy storage with crypto instead of just running your own node but for small, valuable, rarely updated and heavily targeted files (like a website with illegal links) it's perfect.
zeafoamrun 1mo ago
I wasn't aware of the relationship between Shipyard and Protocol Labs but it looks like Protocol Labs spun out maintenance and development of a lot of core IPFS technology to a new company called Shipyard, with the idea of cordoning off what was a cost center to Protocol Labs, and the hope was that Shipyard would be able to find other sources of revenue beyond the services funding they got from Protocol Labs. I'm personally quite disappointed because I just built an IPFS based system built on top of Kubo that I was hoping would take off. Now this throws future maintenance of Kubo into question.
throwawayffffas 1mo ago
Always found ipfs and the whole "web 3.0" company to be incredibly obtuse to work with especially compared to previous peer to peer networks like bit-torrent. I could never shake the feeling there is an unnecessary layer of grift embedded in all the protocols.
jackinloadup 1mo ago
I hope this doesn't signal the decline of ipfs overall. I really would like to see an internet where content addressed routing is a thing.
Zxc369 1mo ago
Thanks, this is helpful
sneak 1mo ago
IPFS never worked right for many years. Great concept, poor implementation. Someone will one day build something that incorporates these ideas.
- inigyou 1mo ago
  They did - Bittorrent
  - tancop 1mo ago
    Optimized for throughput and large files. It's slow to start, downloads chunks in random order and there is no standard way to link torrents together. It's a bad fit for anything that's supposed to replace the traditional web.
    - inigyou 1mo ago
      Bittorrent isn't slow to start.
      - frollogaston 1mo ago
        It takes at least 5 seconds, which is slow for this use case
        inigyou 1mo ago
        Contact tracker (2 RTT UDP), contact some peers (2 RTT TCP, 1 RTT handshake, 1 RTT piece request and response, assuming a very small file). That's 5 RTT, about on par with HTTP 1.1 and TLS (though there's no TLS here). Existing bittorrent software is heavily optimized for batch downloads of big files, but that isn't in the protocol.
JuniperMesos 1mo ago
> If you have a favourite memory of working with Shipyard, or an idea you always hoped IPFS would eventually achieve, we’d love to hear it. Google Form One important thing I'd like to see IPFS or a similar decentralized web technology achieve, is getting rid of the necessity of filling out a Google form in order to tell the Shipyard people what I think about their maintenance of IPFS. Seriously it bugs me when people who ostensibly care about decentralized or privacy technology use a centralized service hosted by a gigantic tech company to accomplish a task because it's convenient (if you already have an account with them), and don't even try to make a decentralized version available. It would have been better if they simply invited people to send them an email.
- zeafoamrun 1mo ago
  Dude they just got shut down and will need to look for new jobs, cut them a tiny bit of slack.
  - JuniperMesos 1mo ago
    It's a problem for the entire ecosystem that the most expedient thing to do, the thing that we should have sympathy for them picking under a time of stress, is the thing that relies on people who want to communicate with them having a Google account and having that communication intermediated through Google with no alternative. And since the entire point of Shipyard as an organization is to be stewards of the decentralized web software ecosystem, the fact that they're not using decentralized web tech is relevant to their mission and values.
    - ktm5j 1mo ago
      I could (sort of) see why you might get this upset if people were required to have a Google account themselves to submit this Google form, but that's not the case. Who are you to tell an underfunded opensource dev company that just lost their biggest project what tools they should use? That email you hypothetically sent will probably get delivered to an account in their Google Workspace, how on earth is that any different?
mickael-kerjean 1mo ago
Kubo is absolutly amazing, is there a group of people interested in keeping kubo alive? If so I'd love to join that conversation
- rinse12 1mo ago
  [dead]
thataccount 1mo ago
What makes/made IPFS special was how it could be seen with relative ease on the standard internet. That feature allowed it to bypass censorship. I cannot say I am surprised that the funding was not re-upped since it seems like the modern web really loves censoring the crap out of things. Edited: I also liked how it bypassed the traditional domain system.
- JuniperMesos 1mo ago
  These are good qualities in general; but it's worth asking why this anti-censorship technology required funding from one organization (Protocol Labs) that could cut off that funding and now has done so. Being economically non-viable without grants is one way that anti-censorship technology is ineffective at its stated goal.
  - thataccount 1mo ago
    My guess is they banked on Web 3 and now want to pivot to AI instead of vast storage of data.
mmastrac 1mo ago
I'm currently on sabbatical looking for volunteer work. I always thought IPFS was an interesting project, might be happy to pitch in some of my now-free bandwidth.
- rinse12 1mo ago
  [dead]
- bastawhiz 1mo ago
  I don't think the problem was a lack of effort. The tech was interesting and innovative but the foundation of it had limits that were extremely hard to work past. As a technology it laid a lot of groundwork for better ideas, but I doubt it's worth investing in.
- momack2 1mo ago
  A few interesting places to get involved: - ATProto ecosystem (built on IPFS content addressing, used by Bluesky): https://atproto.com/guides/tutorials https://atproto.com/guides/tutorials - IPFS contribution guide: https://docs.ipfs.tech/community/contribute/contribution-tutorial/ https://docs.ipfs.tech/community/contribute/contribution-tut... - libp2p maintainers call (networking layer of IPFS & other p2p networks): https://libp2p.io/get-involved/ https://libp2p.io/get-involved/
tingletech 1mo ago
I always thought https://named-data.net https://named-data.net in this are was pretty interesting
scirob 1mo ago
I tried to build a few non crypto decentralized apps. The killer was reliable always deliverability inside the browser. https://inbrowser.link/ https://inbrowser.link/ was a huge jump in utility but came to late the ipfs.js just never worked consistently. In the end the only way to get good XP for yours users was that you provider the IPFS to http gateway for all content but then whats the point its just decentralization theater. I remember in 2015 having the IPFS concept blow my mind its such a memorable moment when it really felt like someone designed something significantly different that current mainstream paradigms. But in the end it seems like it was still a case of a cool technology looking for a use-case not solving a real problem.
- tetrisgm 1mo ago
  Agreed. I was deep in the ecosystem, did the confs, shipped some apps. It’s hard to think of a use case that would be reliable now. Maybe some kinda file sync that is torrent like but http
- QuantumNomad_ 1mo ago
  > In the end the only way to get good XP for yours users was that you provider the IPFS to http gateway for all content but then whats the point its just decentralization theater. I gave my static photo album website image files paths that consisted of /ipfs/ as directory name and ipfs hash as file name. Brave browser was able to figure out that this meant they were available on IPFS, and asked me if i wanted to load the files from IPFS instead of from the web server itself. So over time if hosting files on IPFS got popular, it could have been used automatically by browsers later to load the files from IPFS instead of the web server of the site. Saving bandwidth for the website operators and distributing storage of content which might also help it remain available for longer time. That sort of thing would have been one great outcome, for example, where this sort of hosting your own http gateway for your own IPFS files makes sense like I was doing. Mind you, the web server setup for this was completely straightforward and requires no running of the IPFS services on the web server itself. On the web server it really was plain old directories and file names. As long as they are real IPFS hashes. And calculating the IPFS hash itself I did on my laptop when adding photos. Very sad to hear in this thread that Brave browser has actually removed IPFS support :(
aftbit 1mo ago
I tried to query a lot of resources (NFT images, many of which are/were hosted on IPFS) from IPFS myself using the official Go server, running on some pretty fast/wide hardware, for a good part of 2021 and 2022. It was a dumpster fire. Here are two specific problems that I remember, though I ran into several more. First, the UDP storm that it created somehow broke my network, where all of my switches gave up and just started sending all of its traffic to all of the nodes on the network. That could have been a "me" thing but it really made it hard to trust. I ended up having to give that server its own VLAN. Second, the caching was brain dead. By default, it would write every resource to the cache even if I was just using it to download them to a local directory, so it wrote everything twice. Even worse, when the cache was full, it would just drop the whole cache, which created huge spikes in IO util. I ended up patching the app to remove caching. It felt like a really cool demo that never got cleaned up to work as a real production product.
- Animats 1mo ago
  Ouch. Remember Filecoin? The original concept was that you could buy perpetual storage with a one time payment. It was funded by a crypto asset which was a derivative of mass storage prices, or something like that. Lighthouse supposedly sold such a product.[1] They no longer do.[2] [1] https://www.lighthouse.storage/blogs/Permanent%20Storage%20Powered%20by%20Lighthouse https://www.lighthouse.storage/blogs/Permanent%20Storage%20P... [2] https://www.lighthouse.storage/pricing https://www.lighthouse.storage/pricing
  - ryanshahine 1mo ago
    Filecoin never marketed perpetual storage with a one time payment. Lighthouse is a standalone company.
- inigyou 1mo ago
  Mine was that every request took 2 minutes to resolve
zeafoamrun 1mo ago
Is anyone aware of where IPFS community discussion is taking place? The forum seems almost dead and the community page has broken discord and matrix links.
2color 1mo ago
[dead]
sunshine-o 1mo ago
The question is why IPFS did not get the traction something like Tor had for decades? I believe the fundamental problem of those protocols is everyone fear ending up serving child porn just by running a "node" and taking a chance at explaining the future P2P internet to a judge. IPFS got a CID deny list [0] but it was too little too late - [0] https://badbits.dwebops.pub/ https://badbits.dwebops.pub/
- zaik 1mo ago
  Other nodes cannot make you host arbitrary content you did not request yourself.
  - sunshine-o 1mo ago
    I was talking about running a public IPFS gateway. This is what the deny list is for.
    - sadclown42 1mo ago
      [flagged]
momack2 1mo ago
The post here is pretty confusing (so no blame to anyone who reads this as "IPFS the project" shutting down instead of just a single maintainer team, it's totally misleading) - but this is actually just a sunset announcement for _Shipyard_ - one of many IPFS implementation maintainers. *The IPFS Project is not sunsetting or shutting down* - just switching to individual maintainer grants instead of centralized implementation support within Shipyard.
- arccy 1mo ago
  one of many, or the main maintainers? seems like they run a lot of the well known public infra too.
  - dannyw 1mo ago
    Shipyard has been one of the main maintainers because they have previously been an aggregator of funding — think consulting firm, that gets grants and hires people. Protocol Labs is moving and offering to pay (as far as I understand) the same maintainers and developers directly; just not via Shipyard.
    - sadclown42 1mo ago
      [dead]
- jubilanti 1mo ago
  @dang yes, and title is editorialized, the real one is "The end of IPFS at Shipyard" which is more informative It's still a a real loss, those are widely used products, but the signal that Protocol Labs is sending about IPFS in defunding this might be even worse for the ecosystem. Cloudflare, Brave, and now Protocol Labs have abandoned it.
  - nailer 1mo ago
    This is worth a flag. IPFS no longer having mantainers is VERY far from one company not supporting IPFS anymore.
Razengan 1mo ago
One of the good things about AI could be people picking up or reviving unmaintained open-source projects more easily.
r3trohack3r 1mo ago
If you are a believer in projects like IPFS and want to work on it full time, email me. We are building systems that live in the same space as projects like IPFS, Secure Scuttlebutt, Automerge, Tailscale, etc. For folks who are already experts in this space, able to come in and hit the ground running, remote is an option. For high growth folks, we have in-person in Austin. For folks w/ a U.S. security clearance - we have in-person in DC.
amelius 1mo ago
Wasn't the problem with IPFS always that it allowed random strangers to put data on your machine, which could make you an accessory in crime?
- greyface- 1mo ago
  IPFS doesn't fetch or store content that the user has not explicitly requested. If your application allows strangers to request arbitrary IPFS objects, this might be a concern. Otherwise, no, simply running a node doesn't expose you to this risk.
  - amelius 1mo ago
    Ok, then I misremembered, thanks. (Couldn't it be that the caching behavior of intermediate nodes still make it a possibility?)
- nikisweeting 1mo ago
  You can choose what you pin when you run a node, no one can force you to host stuff you don't want to host.
- inigyou 1mo ago
  Why are you using a web browser then?
jhoechtl 1mo ago
The shit hit the fan once filecoin became intertwined with IPFS. So DOA long time ago.
cryptolobster 1mo ago
[flagged]
nvme0n1p1 1mo ago
What is Shipyard anyway? I see from their site: > We are the core maintainers of IPFS, libp2p, and other foundational open-source web3 primitives. So they just stopped funding every project mentioned on their site? What's left?
fitsumbelay 1mo ago
There's a misleading mismatch between this post's headline and actual headline. I get the incentive to drive views but the cost is a substantial number of comments being about the mismatch and not the content
PonyoSunshine 1mo ago
I had such high hopes for IPFS. I learned about it really early on. Later, I started working at a certain blockchain company and started to work on a fork of it that extended our blockchain technology in the days right before Filecoin became a thing. I can't say I miss working out it after digging into the internals and finding its shortcomings the hard way. I hope it can evolve, but I really believe Bittorrent is the better solution for most of what it was trying to solve.
kris-memoket 1mo ago
nice
hannahhoward 1mo ago
Official announcement from the main project: https://blog.ipfs.tech/2026-08-beyond-sponsored-gateways/ https://blog.ipfs.tech/2026-08-beyond-sponsored-gateways/
- deleted 1mo ago
  [deleted]
belviewreview 1mo ago
Question from a non-techy: if today someone who is a non-techy wants to store some files on ipfs, how hard is it? A few clicks, or a day reading documents and installing software, with various ways of unintentionally fouling it up, or what?

363 points by iand 1mo ago

Has anyone looked at ar.io and have any opinions on it? They claim you are paying for 200 years upfront with a kind of endowment like setup.

tancop 1mo ago
Arweave does what it's designed for right now. When cyberleek came out I went looking for a gateway that wasn't censoring them, found one and downloaded the files using another gateway just to find out if it works (yes it did). You can't do that with a centralized system. For the endowment setup no one knows if their economic thinking will hold up 100 or even 10 years in the future, so the claims that it's permanent are impossible to verify. I wouldn't call it a scam but I'm not fully convinced.

zeckalpha 1mo ago

I have thought IPFS (or something like it) could provide a solution to ongoing scraping woes.

Macha 1mo ago

All those NFT holders where the NFT resolved to a ipfs.io link in shambles

timcobb 1mo ago
Hahaha thanks for this. It's ok, the asset is the block chain entry duh
- bigbuppo 1mo ago
  All my apes gone.
  - timcobb 1mo ago
    Gone but not forgotten
- yieldcrv 1mo ago
  all the NFTs I launched actually were fully onchain SVGs and CSS tried to be the change I wanted to see given where the concept actually found staying power (liquidity pools, instead of collectibles) it wholly needs a new name “NFT” is distracting at this point, they should just called them 721-structs so people don’t get distracted by the fumbled poorly implemented art use case
  - jMyles 1mo ago
    Yeah, when we do NFT ticketing these days, we just say, "have your 1155 ready" with a link to explain what that means. I still think it's pretty obvious that on sufficiently long time-scales that some variant of NFTs will be the winner for event tickets.
    - simonw 1mo ago
      What advantage does blockchain ticketing hold over a centralized database of tickets?
      - frollogaston 1mo ago
        Resale on third-party markets. Centralized is probably good enough for them though.
      - yieldcrv 1mo ago
        despite the "non fungible" in the name, tickets in this format ironically adds fungibility that non-blockchain marketplaces decrease right now outside of the web3 space, all promotion companies release tickets in different ways. the ability to resell them is unknown, the quantity for sale is unknown and opaque, the service fees make no sense for the last 20 years, the ability to transfer them is unknown, and the ability to lose your money on an attempted resale transaction is absurdly high. in comparison, all NFTs in the blockchain space inherit solutions to all of those problems and all marketplaces are just UI's on top of data already there in a uniform way, alongside new problems that are mostly education based and won't be solved with a different user experience (akin to how debit and credit cards introduced new problems with automated teller machines many decades ago, that never were solved but didn't deter the concept) can a centralized marketplace and issuer that conforms solve all of it? of course, but that hasn't been the rubric for nearly a decade.... developing in the blockchain space isn't to attract non-blockchain users - at least for anything that actually earns revenue - its solving frictions for existing blockchain users because they are there, numerous and its lucrative it's a parallel economy that you either accept the existence of or you don't, there are a lot of people trying to act like it has merged with other economies or asking you to use a big stake of money on blockchain assets with the hope that it becomes a bigger stake of money if they did merge, but that's really a distraction that has little to do with what's already happened and functioning fine
- 0x457 1mo ago
  The checksum of the asset is on the blockchain. the asset is somewhere else.
  - timcobb 1mo ago
    Hmm I thought the asset is the block chain entry because that's what you have the key to, that you can re-sell to someone else. It's like crypto, no?
    - uproarchat 1mo ago
      The asset is more akin to a deed or a claim. Most NFTs are images hosted on S3 or IPFS. The blockchain entry is metadata with a pointer to the hosted asset.
      - jdiff 1mo ago
        The NFT is the metadata. The metadata is the token that cannot be funged. The image is a wholly separate thing that a token points at, and multiple tokens can point at the same thing just fine. NFTs be be funge-free but images are fully fungible.
      - Macha 1mo ago
        The value of the deed is it being backed by the legal system as proof of your ownership, up to potentially being enforced with government use of physical force.
      - 0x457 1mo ago
        [flagged]
neoncontrails 1mo ago
I know you jest, but both the IPFS contributors I knew in college graduated to become web3 degens working on decentralized file storage projects. Specifically Walrus, which grew out of Meta's Libra project.
api 1mo ago
Finding out NFTs were just links, didn't even embed the asset, was such a moment for me... like either the people pushing this are complete fools or 100% conscious grifters who know it's total bullshit. I suspect it was a mix. Insane. I think a lot of the AI skepticism comes from the fact that the last major New Thing (tm) pushed by this industry was crypto. People are very, very burned by that. That and how badly social media turned out, but that's a whole different discourse.
- grebc 1mo ago
  Crypto / AI, it’s the same people. Same grift for other people’s money in the form of equity.
- Ekaros 1mo ago
  Even more so when in most cases no one could explain any real type of ownership in terms of working in most existing legal frameworks. What would I have owned exactly? What would have ownership entitled... All very reasonable question. Mostly entirely ignored or handwaved...
  - inigyou 1mo ago
    In the case of the bay area yacht club you would have owned the right to be a member of the yacht club
    - frollogaston 1mo ago
      So they have a cool club for yachting but ruin it with geeky digital tokens
      - inigyou 1mo ago
        Well, the yacht club failed and it was all just a money grab in the end.
- JuniperMesos 1mo ago
  An NFT doesn't have to be just a link; nothing in principle stops someone creating a NFT that stores the full bytes of some digital asset directly on the blockchain, just as nothing in principle stops someone from creating a NFT that doesn't do this (or equivalently, a NFT whose on-chain content is simply a text hyperlink to something). The Bitcoin Ordinals concept of Inscriptions (https://docs.ordinals.com/inscriptions.html https://docs.ordinals.com/inscriptions.html), which is an attempt to build a NFT system for Bitcoin, does culturally encourage placing the bytes of a digital asset into the Bitcoin blockchain, and the tooling around it assumes this model; but again nothing prevents someone from creating an Inscription whose contents are simply a link to something else. And of course there's no reason why a NFT has to be used to represent ownership of some kind of digital art - there are other uses for NFTs, such as modeling transferable network permissions or resources. Ultimately NFTs are a just a specific application of blockchain technology, to represent some kind of resource on a blockchain which could in principle be digital art. If people care about ownership of NFTs representing digital art, that's a social fact about what kinds of art there is market demand for; and whether it matters that the bytes of the digital art are on a blockchain or linked from somewhere else (where they could get taken down or bitrot) is also a social fact. I actually agree that treating NFTs that merely contain a link to some bytes elsewhere that worked at one point in time is a pretty dumb thing to care about, or have a market for (and the use cases for NFTs where the bytes are actually on-chain are, at best, fairly limited, although I wouldn't say completely nonexistent). And certainly the NFT market of 2021 or so, which had a lot of such NFTs, was driven by a weird social mania and people attempting to grift upon that social mania. This has never bothered me though, because I feel the same way about many markets for physical pieces of art; and ultimately it needs to be possible for people to create markets for things I personally think are dumb or at least don't care about.
frollogaston 1mo ago
Why not just use the IPFS hash?
- Macha 1mo ago
  This sounds like a smart idea. That's probably why the NFT hype train didn't do it.
  - frollogaston 1mo ago
    Looks like at least some of the valuable ones did though. The json payload is on ipfs, then the image url is ipfs://. Example: https://bafybeihpjhkeuiq3k6nqa3fkgeigeri7iebtrsuyuey5y6vy36n345xmbi.ipfs.inbrowser.link/645 https://bafybeihpjhkeuiq3k6nqa3fkgeigeri7iebtrsuyuey5y6vy36n... (they stored an ipfs hash only, this link is just a random viewer pointed at it) Btw it's weirdly annoying to get the json payload for one of these

ruined 1mo ago

has protocol labs itself made any kind of announcement? i don't see anything on the blog

chriswarbo 1mo ago
Just checked protocol labs site and... holy shit: > Protocol Labs is an innovation network driving breakthroughs in computing to push humanity forward. PL connects more than 750 tech startups, funds, accelerators, foundations, open source projects, service providers, and other organizations. What happened to them? Seems like they drank their own "Web3" Fla-Vor-Aid.

devttyeu 1mo ago

Sad to see it go having been a maintainer some years ago. For anyone wondering, there are more sustainable (with a viable, focused business backing the project) options to do p2p, namely Iroh - https://www.iroh.computer/ https://www.iroh.computer/ which was built by ex-IPFS ex-Protocol Labs devs (I have no relation to the team beyond having worked with them back in the day). Sadly Protocol Labs is doing.. ehh whatever now, except apparently supporting the projects it got its VC/crypto funding from.

CommanderData 1mo ago
I love Iroh but it doesn't quite work the same as IPFS if I understand correctly.
- knowaveragejoe 1mo ago
  It doesn't, it's a lower level primitive. But things like IPFS can be built on top of it.
- 2color 1mo ago
  The way I would put is as: Iroh + iroh-blobs == libp2p + UnixFS + Bitswap, and the latter three are some of the critical components that have defined most IPFS implementations.
- rklaehn 1mo ago
  If you want to compare iroh with something out of the IPFS world, iroh is basically "what if you build libp2p on multipath QUIC". If you want full ipfs functionality, we have a number of protocols you can combine: blobs https://github.com/n0-computer/iroh-blobs https://github.com/n0-computer/iroh-blobs and gossip https://github.com/n0-computer/iroh-gossip https://github.com/n0-computer/iroh-gossip . There is one thing we do not have yet - global content discovery. The reason for this is that so far we have not found a way to do it in a way that just works. It is a very hard problem, but I hope we can come up with a solution so we can cover the use cases that initially got me excited about IPFS many years ago.
  - 1mo ago

rhodey 1mo ago

This is really unfortunate. When cloudflare dropped IPFS you could say this next step was sort of already on the way. I may be biased but I think when IPFS decided to put so much time into "IPNS" in order to support non-static webapps years ago what they came up with did not fit the need. And without webapps on IPFS things were going nowhere. A year or so ago I wrote IPFS-boot which allows serving webapps on IPFS while providing also an update path and without breaking content hashing: https://github.com/rhodey/IPFS-boot https://github.com/rhodey/IPFS-boot But now if you want to serve a secure webapp and not use IPFS IMO the only option you have is to tell users to install Tailscale and to host the webapp themselves and then to install Tailscale on all devices.

toomuchtodo 1mo ago
I see this very similar to IPv4 and IPv6, and adoption. Non content addressable URL addressing simply is "good enough" for most use cases, and bittorrent is "good enough" for serving content durably and somewhat in a content addressable manner (file hashes, magnet torrents, immutable torrents). Do we need IPFS URLs? It doesn't appear so, it seems like a solution seeking a problem. IPFS gateways will always be a target for abuse and copyright claims as well. If you want to reference resources securely, https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Security/Defenses/Subresource_Integrity https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Security/Defens... is available and widely supported.
- rhodey 1mo ago
  I think something like IPFS is definitely needed. There is nothing stopping you from distributing a webapp on bittorrent but you'll also need to add a README for instructions on how to run the webapp on localhost so a browser can render it. So thats not something that any non-technical user wants to do.
  - toomuchtodo 1mo ago
    Can you share potential webapp use cases that would rely on IPFS or using IPFS for referencing resources would be an improvement? Perhaps my mental has gaps on this topic, and my thoughts and assertions could be incorrect.

its-summertime 1mo ago

Kubo, Helia, Boxo, Rainbow, IPFS Desktop, IPFS Companion, Someguy, Service Worker Gateway, IPFS Check, libp2p, ipfs.io, dweb.link, check.ipfs.network, delegated-ipfs.dev, Wikipedia-on-IPFS. It kinda feels like the AWS or Azure of file distribution, so much stuff so confusing. Also apparently with Protocol Labs owning several of those things despite not operating those things? Ironically seems quite a fragile setup. Regardless, very sad news.

mikert89 1mo ago

Does IPFS actually have users? I remeber when they raised 270 million and a bunch of people there got wildly wealthy

dewey 1mo ago
The only place where I regularly stumble upon on it was/is on libgen.
runarberg 1mo ago
Wait are you telling me yet another supposedly ground breaking technology turned out to be yet another grift. I know a lot of people on HN are going to call me overly cynical. But this pattern should be so obvious by now. Any cynicism to any new ground breaking technology which is gonna solve a problem that exists because of capitalism, that this cynicism is more than warranted. At this point we should all be cynical of any new technology.
- dgellow 1mo ago
  Yeah, I now understand why gray beards are seen as grumpy. Mine isn’t gray yet, but after the 2010s and half of 2020s I can only see as very suspicious any new technology pushed hard by the industry
- deleted 1mo ago
  [deleted]
- int_19h 1mo ago
  New technology has always benefitted first and foremost those in power, simply because people who get to extract wealth from the rest of society can then direct that wealth to acquire new tech first. This was equally true in pre-capitalist societies, or in USSR for that matter. Being cynical about the tech itself is a bridge to nowhere, though, because it does not preclude its existence or usage, it just cuts you away from any benefits that you can personally get out of it - but you're still affected by all the downsides. Don't be cynical about tech. Be angry at the people who want to own it all and use it to exploit you.
1mo ago

gritzko 1mo ago

I can not say IPFS was a bad idea. Consider GitHub: it is a massive content-addressed store with a smiley on it. There has been some very hot P2P products, e.g. Tailscale. Protocol Labs had its peak during/after the ICO, but long-term, (1) they did not focus on some particular audience and (2) performance of the network was not great. I personally believe that their bet on DHT was not the right one (I worked in this area long before IPFS btw). OK, in retrospect we are all wise.

anacrolix 1mo ago
I worked on their DHT and it was broken from the start, and they didn't want to hear how to fix it. What would I know.

rvz 1mo ago

Another shut down post which many of its users did not support the maintainers. You are going to see a lot more shutdown posts around decentralized or federated technologies if you do not support those tools.

dgellow 1mo ago
There are close to no users of IPFS
its-summertime 1mo ago
Protocol Labs owned significant parts of the infrastructure. Regardless of community support, PL leaving would always be damaging.

ThatNodeKid 1mo ago

[flagged]

deleted 1mo ago

[deleted]

jMyles 1mo ago

I publish all of my music in ways that are pirate-friendly, which for the moment just means Bit Torrent and IPFS. See: https://pickipedia.xyz/wiki/Cryptograss:Delivery-kid https://pickipedia.xyz/wiki/Cryptograss:Delivery-kid If IPFS is starting to wane, does anyone else have a suggestion of a replacement about which I might start to educate my fans?

haunter 1mo ago
See I thought if IPFS was picked up by the piracy scene (some bigger private trackers for example) then it probably would have been more successful. Alas I haven't seen it outside of libgen and even there I thought it was a backup option only.
- hiccuphippo 1mo ago
  I always thought it could be the evolution of Bittorrent: updatable torrents (with IPNS), peers sharing files from different "bundles" as long as the bits match. The problem was that there was no good client for it that was better than current torrent clients. When I tested it you had to keep a duplicate of the files in the ipfs cache directory and the client was CLI based which would alienate most users. There's probably no way to have private trackers or to track seed/leech ratios for communities too.
  - fwip 1mo ago
    It was also pretty slow (download rate wise), even if the destination and source node had a good link between them. I think the protocol had a lot of back-and-forth chatter, requesting blocks a few a time.
- tancop 1mo ago
  Arweave on the other hand will be getting some traction from the GTA 6 leaker. It's not good for all use cases because you need to buy storage with crypto instead of just running your own node but for small, valuable, rarely updated and heavily targeted files (like a website with illegal links) it's perfect.

zeafoamrun 1mo ago

I wasn't aware of the relationship between Shipyard and Protocol Labs but it looks like Protocol Labs spun out maintenance and development of a lot of core IPFS technology to a new company called Shipyard, with the idea of cordoning off what was a cost center to Protocol Labs, and the hope was that Shipyard would be able to find other sources of revenue beyond the services funding they got from Protocol Labs. I'm personally quite disappointed because I just built an IPFS based system built on top of Kubo that I was hoping would take off. Now this throws future maintenance of Kubo into question.

throwawayffffas 1mo ago

Always found ipfs and the whole "web 3.0" company to be incredibly obtuse to work with especially compared to previous peer to peer networks like bit-torrent. I could never shake the feeling there is an unnecessary layer of grift embedded in all the protocols.

jackinloadup 1mo ago

I hope this doesn't signal the decline of ipfs overall. I really would like to see an internet where content addressed routing is a thing.

Zxc369 1mo ago

Thanks, this is helpful

sneak 1mo ago

IPFS never worked right for many years. Great concept, poor implementation. Someone will one day build something that incorporates these ideas.

inigyou 1mo ago
They did - Bittorrent
- tancop 1mo ago
  Optimized for throughput and large files. It's slow to start, downloads chunks in random order and there is no standard way to link torrents together. It's a bad fit for anything that's supposed to replace the traditional web.
  - inigyou 1mo ago
    Bittorrent isn't slow to start.
    - frollogaston 1mo ago
      It takes at least 5 seconds, which is slow for this use case
      - inigyou 1mo ago
        Contact tracker (2 RTT UDP), contact some peers (2 RTT TCP, 1 RTT handshake, 1 RTT piece request and response, assuming a very small file). That's 5 RTT, about on par with HTTP 1.1 and TLS (though there's no TLS here). Existing bittorrent software is heavily optimized for batch downloads of big files, but that isn't in the protocol.

JuniperMesos 1mo ago

> If you have a favourite memory of working with Shipyard, or an idea you always hoped IPFS would eventually achieve, we’d love to hear it. Google Form One important thing I'd like to see IPFS or a similar decentralized web technology achieve, is getting rid of the necessity of filling out a Google form in order to tell the Shipyard people what I think about their maintenance of IPFS. Seriously it bugs me when people who ostensibly care about decentralized or privacy technology use a centralized service hosted by a gigantic tech company to accomplish a task because it's convenient (if you already have an account with them), and don't even try to make a decentralized version available. It would have been better if they simply invited people to send them an email.

zeafoamrun 1mo ago
Dude they just got shut down and will need to look for new jobs, cut them a tiny bit of slack.
- JuniperMesos 1mo ago
  It's a problem for the entire ecosystem that the most expedient thing to do, the thing that we should have sympathy for them picking under a time of stress, is the thing that relies on people who want to communicate with them having a Google account and having that communication intermediated through Google with no alternative. And since the entire point of Shipyard as an organization is to be stewards of the decentralized web software ecosystem, the fact that they're not using decentralized web tech is relevant to their mission and values.
  - ktm5j 1mo ago
    I could (sort of) see why you might get this upset if people were required to have a Google account themselves to submit this Google form, but that's not the case. Who are you to tell an underfunded opensource dev company that just lost their biggest project what tools they should use? That email you hypothetically sent will probably get delivered to an account in their Google Workspace, how on earth is that any different?

mickael-kerjean 1mo ago

Kubo is absolutly amazing, is there a group of people interested in keeping kubo alive? If so I'd love to join that conversation

rinse12 1mo ago
[dead]

thataccount 1mo ago

What makes/made IPFS special was how it could be seen with relative ease on the standard internet. That feature allowed it to bypass censorship. I cannot say I am surprised that the funding was not re-upped since it seems like the modern web really loves censoring the crap out of things. Edited: I also liked how it bypassed the traditional domain system.

JuniperMesos 1mo ago
These are good qualities in general; but it's worth asking why this anti-censorship technology required funding from one organization (Protocol Labs) that could cut off that funding and now has done so. Being economically non-viable without grants is one way that anti-censorship technology is ineffective at its stated goal.
- thataccount 1mo ago
  My guess is they banked on Web 3 and now want to pivot to AI instead of vast storage of data.

mmastrac 1mo ago

I'm currently on sabbatical looking for volunteer work. I always thought IPFS was an interesting project, might be happy to pitch in some of my now-free bandwidth.

rinse12 1mo ago
[dead]
bastawhiz 1mo ago
I don't think the problem was a lack of effort. The tech was interesting and innovative but the foundation of it had limits that were extremely hard to work past. As a technology it laid a lot of groundwork for better ideas, but I doubt it's worth investing in.
momack2 1mo ago
A few interesting places to get involved: - ATProto ecosystem (built on IPFS content addressing, used by Bluesky): https://atproto.com/guides/tutorials https://atproto.com/guides/tutorials - IPFS contribution guide: https://docs.ipfs.tech/community/contribute/contribution-tutorial/ https://docs.ipfs.tech/community/contribute/contribution-tut... - libp2p maintainers call (networking layer of IPFS & other p2p networks): https://libp2p.io/get-involved/ https://libp2p.io/get-involved/

tingletech 1mo ago

I always thought https://named-data.net https://named-data.net in this are was pretty interesting

scirob 1mo ago

I tried to build a few non crypto decentralized apps. The killer was reliable always deliverability inside the browser. https://inbrowser.link/ https://inbrowser.link/ was a huge jump in utility but came to late the ipfs.js just never worked consistently. In the end the only way to get good XP for yours users was that you provider the IPFS to http gateway for all content but then whats the point its just decentralization theater. I remember in 2015 having the IPFS concept blow my mind its such a memorable moment when it really felt like someone designed something significantly different that current mainstream paradigms. But in the end it seems like it was still a case of a cool technology looking for a use-case not solving a real problem.

tetrisgm 1mo ago
Agreed. I was deep in the ecosystem, did the confs, shipped some apps. It’s hard to think of a use case that would be reliable now. Maybe some kinda file sync that is torrent like but http
QuantumNomad_ 1mo ago
> In the end the only way to get good XP for yours users was that you provider the IPFS to http gateway for all content but then whats the point its just decentralization theater. I gave my static photo album website image files paths that consisted of /ipfs/ as directory name and ipfs hash as file name. Brave browser was able to figure out that this meant they were available on IPFS, and asked me if i wanted to load the files from IPFS instead of from the web server itself. So over time if hosting files on IPFS got popular, it could have been used automatically by browsers later to load the files from IPFS instead of the web server of the site. Saving bandwidth for the website operators and distributing storage of content which might also help it remain available for longer time. That sort of thing would have been one great outcome, for example, where this sort of hosting your own http gateway for your own IPFS files makes sense like I was doing. Mind you, the web server setup for this was completely straightforward and requires no running of the IPFS services on the web server itself. On the web server it really was plain old directories and file names. As long as they are real IPFS hashes. And calculating the IPFS hash itself I did on my laptop when adding photos. Very sad to hear in this thread that Brave browser has actually removed IPFS support :(

aftbit 1mo ago

I tried to query a lot of resources (NFT images, many of which are/were hosted on IPFS) from IPFS myself using the official Go server, running on some pretty fast/wide hardware, for a good part of 2021 and 2022. It was a dumpster fire. Here are two specific problems that I remember, though I ran into several more. First, the UDP storm that it created somehow broke my network, where all of my switches gave up and just started sending all of its traffic to all of the nodes on the network. That could have been a "me" thing but it really made it hard to trust. I ended up having to give that server its own VLAN. Second, the caching was brain dead. By default, it would write every resource to the cache even if I was just using it to download them to a local directory, so it wrote everything twice. Even worse, when the cache was full, it would just drop the whole cache, which created huge spikes in IO util. I ended up patching the app to remove caching. It felt like a really cool demo that never got cleaned up to work as a real production product.

Animats 1mo ago
Ouch. Remember Filecoin? The original concept was that you could buy perpetual storage with a one time payment. It was funded by a crypto asset which was a derivative of mass storage prices, or something like that. Lighthouse supposedly sold such a product.[1] They no longer do.[2] [1] https://www.lighthouse.storage/blogs/Permanent%20Storage%20Powered%20by%20Lighthouse https://www.lighthouse.storage/blogs/Permanent%20Storage%20P... [2] https://www.lighthouse.storage/pricing https://www.lighthouse.storage/pricing
- ryanshahine 1mo ago
  Filecoin never marketed perpetual storage with a one time payment. Lighthouse is a standalone company.
inigyou 1mo ago
Mine was that every request took 2 minutes to resolve

zeafoamrun 1mo ago

Is anyone aware of where IPFS community discussion is taking place? The forum seems almost dead and the community page has broken discord and matrix links.

2color 1mo ago

[dead]

sunshine-o 1mo ago

The question is why IPFS did not get the traction something like Tor had for decades? I believe the fundamental problem of those protocols is everyone fear ending up serving child porn just by running a "node" and taking a chance at explaining the future P2P internet to a judge. IPFS got a CID deny list [0] but it was too little too late - [0] https://badbits.dwebops.pub/ https://badbits.dwebops.pub/

zaik 1mo ago
Other nodes cannot make you host arbitrary content you did not request yourself.
- sunshine-o 1mo ago
  I was talking about running a public IPFS gateway. This is what the deny list is for.
  - sadclown42 1mo ago
    [flagged]

momack2 1mo ago

The post here is pretty confusing (so no blame to anyone who reads this as "IPFS the project" shutting down instead of just a single maintainer team, it's totally misleading) - but this is actually just a sunset announcement for _Shipyard_ - one of many IPFS implementation maintainers. *The IPFS Project is not sunsetting or shutting down* - just switching to individual maintainer grants instead of centralized implementation support within Shipyard.

arccy 1mo ago
one of many, or the main maintainers? seems like they run a lot of the well known public infra too.
- dannyw 1mo ago
  Shipyard has been one of the main maintainers because they have previously been an aggregator of funding — think consulting firm, that gets grants and hires people. Protocol Labs is moving and offering to pay (as far as I understand) the same maintainers and developers directly; just not via Shipyard.
  - sadclown42 1mo ago
    [dead]
jubilanti 1mo ago
@dang yes, and title is editorialized, the real one is "The end of IPFS at Shipyard" which is more informative It's still a a real loss, those are widely used products, but the signal that Protocol Labs is sending about IPFS in defunding this might be even worse for the ecosystem. Cloudflare, Brave, and now Protocol Labs have abandoned it.
- nailer 1mo ago
  This is worth a flag. IPFS no longer having mantainers is VERY far from one company not supporting IPFS anymore.

Razengan 1mo ago

One of the good things about AI could be people picking up or reviving unmaintained open-source projects more easily.

r3trohack3r 1mo ago

If you are a believer in projects like IPFS and want to work on it full time, email me. We are building systems that live in the same space as projects like IPFS, Secure Scuttlebutt, Automerge, Tailscale, etc. For folks who are already experts in this space, able to come in and hit the ground running, remote is an option. For high growth folks, we have in-person in Austin. For folks w/ a U.S. security clearance - we have in-person in DC.

amelius 1mo ago

Wasn't the problem with IPFS always that it allowed random strangers to put data on your machine, which could make you an accessory in crime?

greyface- 1mo ago
IPFS doesn't fetch or store content that the user has not explicitly requested. If your application allows strangers to request arbitrary IPFS objects, this might be a concern. Otherwise, no, simply running a node doesn't expose you to this risk.
- amelius 1mo ago
  Ok, then I misremembered, thanks. (Couldn't it be that the caching behavior of intermediate nodes still make it a possibility?)
nikisweeting 1mo ago
You can choose what you pin when you run a node, no one can force you to host stuff you don't want to host.
inigyou 1mo ago
Why are you using a web browser then?

jhoechtl 1mo ago

The shit hit the fan once filecoin became intertwined with IPFS. So DOA long time ago.

cryptolobster 1mo ago

[flagged]

nvme0n1p1 1mo ago

What is Shipyard anyway? I see from their site: > We are the core maintainers of IPFS, libp2p, and other foundational open-source web3 primitives. So they just stopped funding every project mentioned on their site? What's left?

fitsumbelay 1mo ago

There's a misleading mismatch between this post's headline and actual headline. I get the incentive to drive views but the cost is a substantial number of comments being about the mismatch and not the content

PonyoSunshine 1mo ago

I had such high hopes for IPFS. I learned about it really early on. Later, I started working at a certain blockchain company and started to work on a fork of it that extended our blockchain technology in the days right before Filecoin became a thing. I can't say I miss working out it after digging into the internals and finding its shortcomings the hard way. I hope it can evolve, but I really believe Bittorrent is the better solution for most of what it was trying to solve.

kris-memoket 1mo ago

nice

hannahhoward 1mo ago

Official announcement from the main project: https://blog.ipfs.tech/2026-08-beyond-sponsored-gateways/ https://blog.ipfs.tech/2026-08-beyond-sponsored-gateways/

deleted 1mo ago
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belviewreview 1mo ago

Question from a non-techy: if today someone who is a non-techy wants to store some files on ipfs, how hard is it? A few clicks, or a day reading documents and installing software, with various ways of unintentionally fouling it up, or what?