I moved my blog from IPFS to a server

https://neimanslab.org/2024-01-31/why-i-moved-my-blog-ipfs-to-server.html

by neiman • 2 years ago

330 166 2 years ago

schmichael• 2 years ago

I pinned content from my own server and played forever with settings and definitions, but couldn’t get the content to be available everywhere.
The blog you’re reading now is built with Jekyll and is hosted on my own 10$ server.
don’t get me wrong, I’m still an IPFS fanboy.

...how could you still be a fanboy? When IPFS cannot fulfill even the most basic function of globally serving static content, why does it deserve anyone's interest? It's not even new or cutting edge at this point. After 8 years of development how can the most basic functionality still not work for even an expert?

neiman4• 2 years ago

It worked fine before for many years when it was slightly less popular.

They're having growing pains due to scalability problems and some libraries, like Helia (the JS library of IPFS), being new. I guess I'm also quite stubborn in wanting to do it my way, without the aid of any services, and for the content I pin to be available in all places, including Helia in the browser.

p4bl07• 2 years ago

The official IPFS client in Go has always been very, very hungry for resources. At some point it crashed because it needed to many file descriptors if it ran for too long. Even for a simple static site with infrequent update it needed some maintenance. But even if one was willing to put the effort in, it was not actually rewarded, because if your server were you pin your website is offline, the truth is that your site is offline too, so what's the point?

withinboredom2• 2 years ago

[wrong thread]

TheRealPomax2• 2 years ago

What on earth are you talking about? IPFS has nothing to do with "coins", it's a distributed data management system. You can use IPFS for finance in the same way you can use a database for finance. You can also use IPFS for literally anything else that falls in the "data that you want other people to be able to access" category.

heipei• 2 years ago

It's working fabulously for hosting phishing websites frontend by the popular IPFS gateway providers like Cloudflare, so at least there's that...

lindig• 2 years ago

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

pierat• 2 years ago

Here's your $.10/day for that 1GB with bandwidth... but running the filecoin stack will cost you a $50/mo server.

That fucker's a PIG on cpu and ram.

kkielhofner• 2 years ago

IPFS is as well.

Clearly much more going on but take a machine that can serve 10k req/s with [insert 100 things here] without flinching and watch it maybe, just maybe, do 10 with IPFS.

I'm not kidding.

diggan3• 2 years ago

to be as simple as Dropbox to store files. But visit https://filecoin.io/ and the dropbox-like app that you could be willing to try is nowhere to be found

I agree with this fully. But as said elsewhere, it's kind of far away from that, and also slightly misdirected.

Imagine asking someone to get started with web development by sending them to https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc793.txt (the TCP specification). Filecoin is just the protocol, and won't ever solve that particular problem, as it's not focused on solving that particular problem, it's up to client implementations to solve.

But the ecosystem is for sure missing an easy to use / end-user application like Dropbox for storing files in a decentralized and secure way.

poorman• 2 years ago

That flagship app you are looking for seems to be https://nft.storage/ (by Protocol Labs).

nickstinemates• 2 years ago

this is what storj.io does.

ahmedfromtunis• 2 years ago

This is, in my opinion, is the first and only "solution" to a real problem built using the blockchain.

Distributed file storage, if done correctly, can be a transformative technology. And it can be even more revolutionary implemented at the OS level.

chrisco255• 2 years ago

Fileverse is an app built on ipfs and it is very user friendly: https://fileverse.io/

p4bl07• 2 years ago

I'm surprised by the beginning of the post talking about pioneering in 2019. Maybe it is the case for ENS (I never cared for it), but regarding IPFS, my website was available over IPFS 3 years before that in 2016 [1]. Granted, I was never IPFS only. I also started publishing a series of article about censorship-resistant internet (Tor, I2P, IPFS, and ZeroNet) in 2600 Magazine – The Hacker Quarterly – back in 2017 [2].

Anyway, I came to the same conclusion as the author, but several years ago: in the end, nothing is actually decentralized, and maintaining this illusion of decentralization is actually costly, for no real purpose (other than the initial enjoyment of playing with a new tech, that is).

So I stopped maintaining it a few years ago. That decision was also because of the growing involvement of some of these projects with blockchain tech that I never wanted to be a part of. This is also why I cancelled my article series in 2600 before publishing those on IPFS and ZeroNet.

[1] See for example this archive of my HN profile page from 2016 with the link to it: https://web.archive.org/web/20161122210110/https://news.ycom...

[2] https://pablo.rauzy.name/outreach.html#2600

neiman4• 2 years ago

Maybe it is the case for ENS

Oh yeah, I was referring strictly to IPFS+ENS websites. I have been working with it for several years so my mind goes for this use-case automatically.

r3trohack3r2• 2 years ago

Anyway, I came to the same conclusion as the author, but several years ago: in the end, nothing is actually decentralized, and maintaining this illusion of decentralization is actually costly, for no real purpose (other than the initial enjoyment of playing with a new tech, that is).

Do you have any writing (blog posts, HN comments, etc.) where you explore this thought more? I'm in the thick of building p2p software, very interested in what you came to know during that time.

pphysch2• 2 years ago

True P2P networks don't scale, because every node has to store an (accurate if partial) representation of the whole network. Growing the network is easy, but growing every single node is virtually impossible (unless you control them all...). Any attempt to tackle that tends to increase centralization, e.g. in the form of routing authorities.

And if you try to tackle centralization directly (like banning routers or something), you will often create an anti-centralization regulator, which is, you guessed it, another form of centralization.

So your decentralized P2P network is either small and works good, medium and works not so good, or large and not actually decentralized.

The best P2P networks know their limits and don't try to scale infinitely. For human-oriented network, Dunbar's Number (N=~150) is a decent rule of thumb; any P2P network larger than that almost certainly has some form of centralization (like trusted bootstrapping/coordination server addresses that are hard-coded in every client install, etc.)

p4bl07• 2 years ago

The main thing is that "true" (in the sense of absolute) decentralization does not actually work. It doesn't work technically, and it doesn't work socially/politically. We always need some form of collective control over what's going on. We need moderation tools, we need to me able to make errors and fix them, etc. Centralized systems tend to be authoritarians, but the pursue of absolute decentralization always end up being very individualistic (and some kind of wrongly placed elitism). There are middle grounds: federated systems for example, like Mastodon or emails, actually work.

That is not to say that all p2p software is bad, especially since we call p2p a lot of things that are not entirely p2p. For example, BitTorrent is a p2p software, but its actual usage by humans relies on multiple more-or-less centralized point, trackers and torrent search engine.

Almondsetat2• 2 years ago

Your software cannot be more decentralized than your hardware.

For example, true p2p can only happen if you meet with someone and use a cable, bluetooth or local wifi. Anything over the internet needs to pass through routers and *poof* decentralization's gone and you now need to trust servers to a varying level of degrees

unethical_ban• 2 years ago

I'll add to what others have said better.

Decentralized, globally accessible resources still take some kind of coordination to discover those resources, and a shit-ton of redundant nodes and data and routing. There is always some coordination or consensus.

At least, that's my take on it. Does not tor have official records for exit and bridge nodes?

int_19h3• 2 years ago

I may be missing something, but name resolution has been touted as one of the more legitimate and sensible uses for blockchain for a very long time. Could you clarify what your issues with it in IPFS context are?

edent• 2 years ago

It isn't. Unless you want a long incomprehensible string.

Someone is always going to want a short, unique, and memorable name. And when two people share the same name (McDonald, Nissan, etc) there needs to be a way to disambiguate them.

If people die and are unable to release a desirable name, that just makes the whole system less desirable.

I know one of the canonical hard problems in Computer Science is "naming things" and this is a prime example!

ShamelessC2• 2 years ago

but name resolution has been touted as one of the more legitimate and sensible uses for blockchain for a very long time.

Blockchain enthusiasts have a history of talking out of their ass and being susceptible to the lies of others.

p4bl07• 2 years ago

Well, I do not actually believe that blockchains can do name resolution correctly. First and foremost, the essential thing to understand about blockchains is that the only thing that is guaranteed by writing an information on a blockchain is that this information is written on this blockchain. And that's it. If the writing itself is not performative, in that it's mere existence performs what it describes, then nothing has been done. It works for crypto-assets because what makes a transaction happen is that it is written on the blockchain where that crypto-asset lives and where people look to see what happened with that crypto-asset.

But for any other usage, it cannot work, blockchain are useless. Someone or something somewhere has to make sure either that what's written on the blockchain corresponds to the real world, or to make the real worlds corresponds to what's written on the blockchain. Either way you need to have a kind of central authority, or at least trusted third parties. And that means you don't actually need a blockchain in the first place. We have better, more secured, more efficient, less costly alternatives to using a blockchain.

Back to name resolutions.

Virtually no one is going to actually host locally the blockchain where all names are stored. That would be way too big and could only get bigger and bigger, as a blockchain stores transactions (i.e., diffs) rather than current state. So in practice people and their devices would ask resolvers, just like they currently do with DNS. These resolvers would need to keep a database of the state of all names up-to-date because querying a blockchain is way too inefficient, running such a resolvers would be a lot more costly than running a DNS servers so there would be less of them. Here we just lost decentralization which was the point of the system. But that's just a technical problem. There is more: what if someone gets a name and we as a society (i.e., justice, whatever) decides that they should not be in control of it? Either we are able to enforce this decision and it means the system is not actually decentralized (so, we don't need a blockchain), or we can't, and that's a problem. What if a private key is lost, the associated names are gone forever? What if your private key is leaked by mistake and someone hostile take control of your name?

Using a blockchain for names resolution doesn't actually work, not for a human society.

DEDLINE• 2 years ago

When evaluating use-cases where blockchain technology is leveraged to disintermediate, I came to your same conclusions. Technically novel? Yes, sure. But, for what?

hanniabu• 2 years ago

For incentive alignment, consensus, trustless, etc

chaxor• 2 years 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.

wuiheerfoj3• 2 years 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/

wharvle• 2 years 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.

teeray• 2 years ago

I also started publishing a series of article about censorship-resistant internet (Tor, I2P, IPFS, and ZeroNet) in 2600 Magazine – The Hacker Quarterly – back in 2017

I very much enjoyed your articles on Tor and I2P :) I2P was entirely new to me, so I found that particularly interesting. I did idly wonder when the next article was coming, so I’m glad I didn’t just miss it in some issue. Totally understand where you’re coming from.

p4bl07• 2 years ago

Thanks! It's always great to have feedback on paper-published content :).

nonrandomstring• 2 years ago

Well done to the author for writing this up.

Having tried fringe technologies over the years, spun up a server and run them for a few months, struggled and seen all the rough edges and loose threads, I often come to the point of feeling - this technology is good, but it's not ready yet. Time to let more determined people carry the torch.

The upside is:

- you tried, and so contributed to the ecosystem

- you told people what needs improving

Just quitting and not writing about your experience seems a waste for everyone, so good to know why web hosting on IPFS is still rough.

yieldcrv2• 2 years ago

I host all the static files of my Netlify and Vercel servers on IPFS

it is simple enough and free even on hosted solutions, and it keeps my Netlify and Vercel free during spikes in traffic

but the availability issue is perplexing, just like OP encountered

some people just randomly wont be able to resolve some assets on your site, sometimes! the gateways go up and down, their cache of your file comes and goes. browsers dont natively resolve ipfs:// uris. its very weird.

indigodaddy2• 2 years ago

“ and it keeps my Netlify and Vercel free during spikes in traffic” — how exactly would this help re: potentially breaching outbound transfer limits?

yieldcrv2• 2 years ago

if static assets arent being requested from their server then it would not contribute to your bandwidth meter

MenhirMike• 2 years ago

the more readers it has, the faster it is to use it since some readers help to spread the content (Scalable).

In other words: Once a few big websites are established, no small website will ever be able to gain traction again because the big websites are simply easier to reach and thus more attractive to use. And just like an unpopular old torrent, eventually you run out of seeders and your site is lost forever.

One can argue about the value of low traffic websites, but I got to wonder: Who in their right mind thinks "Yeah, I want to make a website and then have others decide if it's allowed to live". Then again, maybe that kind of "survival of the fittest" is appealing to some folks.

As far as I am concerned, it sounds like a stupid idea. (Which the author goes into more detail, so that's a good write up)

lelandbatey• 2 years ago

It's not up to others alone; you get a say too because you can seed your own content and that can be fast. In the worst case of no interest, then it's approximately the same as you hosting your own website in the world of today. This doesn't exonerate the shortfall of the "old torrent" pattern though, as you say.

fodkodrasz3• 2 years ago

This is a false dilemma. Why would you not "seed" (pin) your own site, and be at others' mercy? You pin it, and when others also do so, the readers get faster and more redundant service.

kimixa• 2 years ago

For "unpopular" sites having a single origin somewhat removes the advantages of IPFS, it's not decentralized, not censorship resilient, and still costs the publisher for ongoing infrastructure to host it. Yet still had the disadvantages and complexity of IPFS vs a static http server.

So if you're not going to be publishing something that will always have multiple copies floating around, why use IPFS?

p4bl07• 2 years ago

If you need to pin your content anyway, it's actually faster and less expensive to host a normal website then. And if you want to get it to readers faster, there are a lot a cheap or free CDN available, but that's generally not even an issue with the kind of website we're talking about here when they're served normally, over the web.

kevincox• 2 years ago

It is also worth noting that most IPFS peers will cache content for some period of time even if not explicitly pinned. So if you site hits the top of Hacker News (and everyone was using a native IPFS browser) you would suddenly have thousands of peers with the content available. So in theory your one node can serve infinite users since once you serve one copy to the first user that user can replicate it to others. (The real world is of course more complicated but the idea works decently well in practice.)

koito17• 2 years ago

it’s quite an inconvenience to run your own IPFS node. But even if you do run your own node, the fact you access a website doesn’t mean you pin it. Not at all.

This has always been my major UX gripe with IPFS. The fact that `ipfs add` in the command line does little but generate a hash and you need to actually pin things in order to "seed" them, so to speak. So "adding a file to IPFS", in the sense of "adding a file to the network", requires the user to know that (1) the "add" in `ipfs add` does not add a file to the network, and (2) you must pin everything you want to replicate manually. I remember as recently as 2021 having to manually pin each file in a directory since pinning the directory does not recursively pin files. Doing this by hand for small folders is okay, but large folders? Not so much.

More importantly, the BitTorrent duplication problems that IPFS has solved are also solved in BitTorrent v2, and BitTorrent v2 IMO solves these problems in a much better way (you can create "hybrid torrents" which allows a great deal of backwards compatibility with existing torrent software).

This isn't a UX issue, but another thing that makes it hard for me to recommend IPFS to friends is the increasing association with "Web3" and cryptocurrency. I don't have any strong opinions on "Web3", but to many people, it's an instant deal-breaker.

hot_gril8• 2 years ago

IPFS provides nice stable links to media, and there are HTTP->IPFS gateways if needed. That seems useful for embedding content on multiple apps/sites. Yeah it happens to fit NFTs particularly well, then again we all know what BitTorrent is known for. And yes I agree IPFS has some UI problems.

Would BitTorrent also be suitable for hosting embeddable content? I haven't seen that yet. A magnet URL is mainly a file hash and doesn't seem to encode a particular peer server, kinda like IPFS. But every time I've torrented Ubuntu, it's taken half a minute just to find the peers.

mvdtnz• 2 years ago

IPFS provides nice stable links to media

Anyone who has tried to torrent an old movie or lesser-known television show knows this is simply not true.

rakoo2• 2 years ago

Would BitTorrent also be suitable for hosting embeddable content?

Same as IPFS: gateways can exist. It's not specific to Bittorrent, or IPFS.

A magnet URL is mainly a file hash and doesn't seem to encode a particular peer server, kinda like IPFS.

Magnet links can include a HTTP server that also hosts the content

flashm• 2 years ago

‘ipfs add’ pins the file by default, not sure if that’s recent behaviour though.

diggan3• 2 years ago

It's not recent, been like that since at least 2015, if not earlier.

Hendrikto• 2 years ago

I remember as recently as 2021 having to manually pin each file in a directory since pinning the directory does not recursively pin files. Doing this by hand for small folders is okay, but large folders? Not so much.

Can‘t you just use a glob?

b_fiive4• 2 years ago

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

hot_gril8• 2 years ago

Is it named after the Avatar character?

joshspankit• 2 years ago

Yes, and that makes me happy every time I see it.

b_fiive4• 2 years ago

I can neither confirm nor deny, but oh boy does uncle iroh seem cool

gabesullice• 2 years ago

Super intriguing. Thanks for sharing!

It reminds me a bit of an early Go project called Upspin [1]. And also a bit of Solid [2]. Did you take any inspiration from them?

What excites me about your project is that you're addressing the elephant in the room when it comes to data sovereignty (~nobody wants to self-host a personal database but their personal devices aren't publicly accessible) in an elegant way.

By storing the data on my personal device and (presumably?) paying for a managed relay (and maybe an encrypted backup), I can keep my data in my physical possession, but I won't have to host anything on my own. Is that the idea?

[1] https://upspin.io/ [2] https://solidproject.org/

b_fiive4• 2 years ago

Ah <3 Upspin! It's been a minute. I've personally read through & love Upspin. I always found solid a little too tied to RDF & the semantic web push. The solid project is/was super valiant effort, but these days I feel like the semantic web push peaked with HTML & schema.org.

By storing the data on my personal device and (presumably?) paying for a managed relay (and maybe an encrypted backup), I can keep my data in my physical possession, but I won't have to host anything on my own. Is that the idea?

We're hoping to give that exact setup to app developers (maybe that's you :). We still have work to do on encryption at rest to keep the hosted server "dumb", and more plumbing into existing app development ecosystems like flutter, expo, tauri, etc. but yes, that's the hope. Give developers tools to ship apps that renegotiate the "user social contract".

ChadNauseam• 2 years ago

I feel like this type of project is a natural fit as the transport layer for CRDT-based applications. Something like: each user/device has an append-only log of CRDT events, then applications merge events from multiple logs to create a collaborative experience. (I have no idea if iroh supports append-only logs, but it seems like a common thing for projects in this space to support.) What do you think?

b_fiive4• 2 years ago

yep! Iroh documents [1] give you a very nice primitive that is technically a CRDT, but in practice most people use it as a key-value store. We really wanted a mutable solution that would support real deletions (instead of tombstones), and starting with append-only logs locks you out of that choice.

With Iroh + CRDTs you have three choices: 1. Use iroh's connection & gossip layers in conjunction with a mature CRDT library like Automerge or Y.js. 2. Build a more sophisticated CRDT on top of iroh documents. 3. Worry a little less about weather your data structures form a semilattice & build on a last-writer wins key-value store (basically: just use documents)

We've seen uses for all three. Hope that helps!

[1] https://iroh.computer/docs/layers/documents

axegon_• 2 years ago

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

hot_gril8• 2 years ago

Same. IPFS seems far more useful for hosting static content that might be embedded in multiple websites.

neiman4• 2 years ago

I get told that a lot! xD

My original aim was to write an IPFS blogging engine for my personal use, so I needed some dynamic loading from IPFS there.

Now I switched to Jekyll, and it would be easier to host the blog on Github indeed, but I'm kind of playing a quixotic game of trying to minimize the presence of Google/Microsoft/Amazon and other big-tech in my life.

walterbell• 2 years ago

Free tier of indie https://neocities.org supports static sites like Jekyll.

ChrisArchitect• 2 years ago

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

shp0ngle• 2 years ago

Yeah this is exactly my experience with IPFS. Nobody actually uses IPFS directly, and even those few that do never actually pin anything because it's an extra step.

(Also I heard it's computationally costly, but I am not sure if it's true, I can't imagine why it would be the case actually.)

As a result it's actually more centralised than web, there are like 3 pinning services that everyone uses. At which point I don't get the extra hoops.

filebase• 2 years ago

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

neiman4• 2 years ago

Oh yes, I even had a free IPNS pinning service (for community members mostly) built with a friend.

https://dwebservices.xyz/

mbgerring• 2 years ago

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

treyd• 2 years ago

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

alucart• 2 years ago

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

Wonder if there is actual use or need for such thing.

tempaccount1234• 2 years ago

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

wyck• 2 years ago

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

mawise• 2 years ago

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

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Scuttlebutt

deephire• 2 years ago

Any thoughts on the services that make hosting a blog on IPFS easier?

Services like https://dappling.network, https://spheron.network, https://fleek.co, etc?

I've seen some DeFi protocols use IPFS to add some resiliency to their frontends. If their centralized frontend with vercel or whatever is down, they can direct users to their IPFS/ENS entrypoint.

fsiefken• 2 years ago

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

dannyobrien• 2 years ago

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

anacrolix• 2 years ago

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

Avamander• 2 years ago

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

fractalnetworks• 2 years ago

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

zubairq• 2 years ago

I did a similar thing on a project of mine where I used to use IPFS as the only long term storage layer on a project of mine. I still use IPFS but now I use it more as "long term unreliable storage". Note that I use IPFS without Filecoin or any external pinning services, instead chose to pin the content from my own server on regular basis.

The current status is that I plan to bring back IPFS usage more in the future for my project, but will wait for the ecosystem to mature a bit more first with regards to libraries.

geokon• 2 years ago

"This is a huge difference from BitTorrent where the only way to get content is to run your own software, and when you download something you also share it, by default."

As far as I understand this isn't a solved technical problem - but mostly a cultural quirk and probably just due to how the early torrent clients were configured

There is for instance a major Chinese torrent client (that name escapes me) that doesn't seed by default - so the whole thing could have easily not worked. If IPFS clients don't seed by default then that kinda sounds like either a design mistake or a "culture problem"

I've always wondered if there was a way to check if a client is reseeding (eg. request and download a bit from a different IP) and then blacklist them if they provide the data (or throttle them or something)

wruza• 2 years ago

They probably don’t seed by default for a good reason. While torrents aren’t inherently political unlike signal and others, their culture is close to “legal ussues”. As a seeder I respect that and that’s why I’m seeding to high ratios. For every seeder of a specific piece of content there are 10x (20x? 50x?) more people who cannot share it back.

But if you want to fence them off, you can use private trackers with ul/dl ratio accounting.

hirako2000• 2 years ago

On the need to run a node, i have a little project to wrap the static site content with an IPFS node in JS.

E.g there is already helia.

https://github.com/ipfs/helia

Just waiting for running a node on the browser tab to become insignificant, resource wise.

nikisweeting• 2 years ago

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

ianopolous2• 2 years ago

We have a FUSE mount in Peergos[0][1] (built on IPFS). It lets you mount any folder read or write (within your access).

[0] https://github.com/peergos/peergos [1] https://peergos.org

willscott• 2 years ago

https://github.com/djdv/go-filesystem-utils/pull/40 lets you interact with IPFS as an NFS mount

ianopolous2• 2 years ago

I've been hosting my website on Peergos (built on ipfs) for years now (founder here). Peergos solves a lot of the issues with mutable data (also privacy, access control). You can see how fast updates show up from an independent server here: https://peergos.org/posts/p2p-web-hosting

My personal website served from a peergos gateway (anyone can run one) is https://ianopolous.peergos.me/

If you want to read more check out our book: https://book.peergos.org

sharperguy• 2 years ago

I think the main difference between IPFS and bittorrent in terms of usage patterns is that IPFS is being used to host content that could easily by just a regular HTTP server, whereas bittorrent is hosting data which is highly desired and would be impossible or very expensive to host on HTTP.

And so naturally relays pop up, and the relays end up being more convenient than actually using the underlying protocol.

diggan3• 2 years ago

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

xiaojay2022• 2 years ago

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

miga• 2 years ago

Did you try FileCoin instead?

I moved my blog from IPFS to a server

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