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Neocities is implementing IPFS – distributed, permanent web

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Re: Neocities is implementing IPFS – distributed, permanent web

#71

Post by comex »

_mhr_ wrote: post #41
adrusi wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With IPNS, which allows the creation of links whose destination can be mutated by whoever has the private key, you can implement quite a lot of interactivity. You won't ever be able to implement facebook over this platform, but you can replicate all of its functionality by using a tumblog-like architecture. Facebook's design is inherently centralized, and therefore doesn't really fit into the world of IPFS. The idea…

How does friend recommendation work in a decentralized model?

Isn't friend recommendation mostly stuff like "people who follow you/you follow also follow X"? Maybe going one or two more follow hops, but not so far out that you need a global view of the social graph. If users of a decentralized network publish their following and follower lists, it should be pretty easy for a local crawler to check those hops.

Re: Neocities is implementing IPFS – distributed, permanent web

#72

Post by lewisl9029 »

whyrusleeping wrote: post #69
lewisl9029 wrote: post #68

So let's say I'm building a decentralized chat app built on some DHT and would like to host it on IPFS. I imagine getting the static html/js/css for the client-side app onto IPFS should be simple enough, but how would I handle bootstrapping? Even in a decentralized service, clients need to connect to a seed server somewhere to start querying for other peers on the DHT. Would it be possible to host such a seed server…

The way our network currently bootstraps is to dial a set of peers that are hardcoded into the default config file. We also have mdns for finding peers that are on your LAN without the need for any hard coded addresses.

Thanks for the quick reply. I was actually thinking of an app running on a separate IP-based DHT, but your reply brought to my attention that IPFS actually already runs on a DHT.

Since IPFS runs on its own DHT, are there any plans for a client-side IPFS DHT library for apps to use to connect to peers on the IPFS network? Similar to https://github.com/feross/bittorrent-dht, but with native support for IPFS peers?

Something like this would make building a client-side real-time app based on IPFS a much more streamlined experience since developers won't have to depend on an external DHT.

Re: Neocities is implementing IPFS – distributed, permanent web

#73

Post by nabla9 »

gtrubetskoy wrote: post #23

My first thought is how does it handle SHA hash collisions? Googling for it took me back to HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9322489 AFAICT it's not yet resolved.

256 bit hash collisions have so low probability that you don't need to prepare for them. If one happens, its cause for celebration.

You can cover earth surface with 8.5×10^36 oxygen atoms. Imagine that every one of them is IPFS file with 256 bit hash. Probability of collision is still less than 0.1%.

Re: Neocities is implementing IPFS – distributed, permanent web

#74

Post by colordrops »

adrusi wrote: post #30
giancarlostoro wrote: post #6

So is this primarily for static websites? I don't see dynamic websites going too well with this system. Edit: If someone like GitHub supported this for GitHub pages it would be a great step forward for this as well.

With IPNS, which allows the creation of links whose destination can be mutated by whoever has the private key, you can implement quite a lot of interactivity. You won't ever be able to implement facebook over this platform, but you can replicate all of its functionality by using a tumblog-like architecture. Facebook's design is inherently centralized, and therefore doesn't really fit into the world of IPFS. The idea…

> Facebook's design is inherently centralized

Not really. There's no reason you couldn't implement Facebook's core functionality with personal servers containing a profile at each node and a pub/sub (or even just pull) system connecting each node with its friends.

Re: Neocities is implementing IPFS – distributed, permanent web

#75

Post by fineline »

radlad wrote: post #14

I'm very excited to see what happens with IPFS. The article talks about replacing HTTP however, and this is definitely a tricky task. Someone in this thread already asked one of my questions (So is this primarily for static websites?) but my second question is: So is this primarily for personal websites? I'm having a hard time finding a good way for Facebook, for example, to monetize their website. Targeting ads go o…

Interesting point - but why wouldn't the business model that worked for Facebook - ads - work on a decentralised web? Instead of posting content to FB alongside which they run ads and generate revenue, individual publishers could keep the ad revenue themselves, perhaps with a brokerage / commission model like Google operate. Seems to work OK for blogs, which are quite decentralised. Why shouldn't it work for status feeds?

In terms of targeting, once you're dealing with "small data" instead of centralised "big data" you need a lot less algorithms to figure out what ads might work. A FB neural net probably does a lot of deep learning to guess that a bunch of mountain-biking friends might be interested in saddles. Decentralised operators could probably figure that out themselves.

Re: Neocities is implementing IPFS – distributed, permanent web

#76

Post by TuringTest »

radlad wrote: post #28
logn wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One monetization strategy in general for distributed networks is that users pay for bandwidth. They're rewarded for the bandwidth they provide. They profit if they provide more bandwidth than they use. And app developers are rewarded when their apps cause bandwidth to be used. I don't know if IPFS works this way. As far as paying a premium over raw bandwidth to access premium content (Netflix), you could pay them to…

Oh, of course, I'm not trying to argue that DRM is good or that decentralization would make it better or even work as well. The problem of course is that without it working as well as it currently does, premium content providers have no incentive (and in fact, are decentivized) from making the switch. The general idea of decrypting premium content at a cost would work fairly well, however I'm wondering if it's someth…

Delivery of the unencrypted premium content would likely happen through a direct link with a different protocol. As you say, the content providers don't want that content to be accessible to everyone in the network.

The website used to navigate the catalog of premium content could be built as a IPFS page though.

Re: Neocities is implementing IPFS – distributed, permanent web

#77

Post by giodamelio »

_prometheus wrote: post #18
daveidol wrote: post #2

Awesome writeup! Sure, it's easier to setup your own web presence with "the cloud" today than it used to be, but this only further centralizes control of content to the big cloud providers. Not to mention the cost of bandwidth when serving content via HTTP. Sure, you can distribute your content via BitTorrent, but what kind of user experience is that? Can my grandma use it? Probably not. I hope IPFS sees further adop…

Thanks! Help us make it :) -- https://github.com/ipfs/ and, you'll love what we have coming. Soon, you won't need to install ipfs at all :D

Are you talking implementing IPFS on the browser level? Is there public code yet?

Re: Neocities is implementing IPFS – distributed, permanent web

#78

Post by sdoering »

mortenjorck wrote: post #5

Reading this felt kind of like the first time I read a writeup on Bitcoin. There's the same sense of throwing out some old, formerly immutable rules here, the excitement of something that's going to test some boundaries and inevitably clash with some authority (how can you, for instance, comply with the EU's "right to be forgotten" when that information is scattered into a redundant mesh?). Interesting times ahead fo…

Isn't the right to be forgotten something, that esp. relates to search engines? They (esp. Google) have to delete the links to this content, but the content can stay on the web forever.

So this isn't per se a problem. But what happens, when I act as a "mirror" in this net and have mirrored some questionable content (who ever might define questionable is up to anybody to imagine). Will I get a shake down from the authorities, as oftentimes happened with people having tor exit nodes?

I fear that the clash would come rather sooner then later, as a lot of people do have a lot of incentives for a centralized web (money, politics, control, power).

Re: Neocities is implementing IPFS – distributed, permanent web

#79

Post by sdoering »

_prometheus wrote: post #20
jeswin wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree. What we really need is for browser vendors to get together, bring in the tremendous financial and technical resources they have, and get a decentralized protocol formalized and supported across browsers. It may take years, but it needs to be done. That would change the internet, and the world.

Two pieces of (coming soon) good news: - very soon, you wont need to install anything to use IPFS. it will "just work" with js on today's browsers. - for best perf, yes, we need browser implementations. and... those have begun :)

OK, as apparently .js is the defacto thing to build cool sites, I for one will be left out here.

On sites not known to me, I typically block most (read all) .js at first, just to make sure that these sites do not leak too much information about me to external tracking tools, advertisers or the like.

So using .js seems to me a bit problematic in regards of people not enabling it by default (but this is an absolut minority, if I look at the stats of the sites I analyze).

Re: Neocities is implementing IPFS – distributed, permanent web

#80

Post by sdoering »

viraptor wrote: post #36
mortenjorck wrote: post #5

Reading this felt kind of like the first time I read a writeup on Bitcoin. There's the same sense of throwing out some old, formerly immutable rules here, the excitement of something that's going to test some boundaries and inevitably clash with some authority (how can you, for instance, comply with the EU's "right to be forgotten" when that information is scattered into a redundant mesh?). Interesting times ahead fo…

Right to be forgotten however applies only to search engines right now, doesn't it? The articles the results used to point to still exist. So a redundant mesh itself doesn't seem to apply here.

Sorry, hadn't read your comment, before stating the same. Hat tip to you.
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