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Neocities is implementing IPFS – distributed, permanent web

ipfs.io

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Re: Neocities is implementing IPFS – distributed, permanent web

#111
post #100

Just reading back though the specification of IPFS, be wary about the claims of 'permanent Web'. Distributed content in IPFS is eventually purged from nodes unless one of the hosting nodes has pinned it to be retained. Therefore, if no-one at Time x views certain content and pins it, then unfortunately at Time x + n that content might disappear just as thoroughly as under HTTP. Unfortunately I fear that means that 'p…

The idea is that people who care most about keeping it up will pin it, or pay to keep it pinned.

Much like they do now by keeping their web server online?

Re: Neocities is implementing IPFS – distributed, permanent web

#112
post #89

- So I want to download a file over IPFS today, how do I go about it? What sort of client do I use? - Now I want to view a whole web page. Is that possible? - Let's say I have a site that I want to publish through this, along with a bunch of files (images, downloads). I'm serving that site now through Apache. Do I need to 're-publish' each file (using the command in the article) every time a file on there changes? Or…

1) you either use one of the public, legacy http gateways and dial https://ipfs.io/ipfs/$myContentHash(/andDepending/maybe/Some... or you use the go implementation which is available for download at https://ipfs.io as a compiled binary.

You can use it like a unix command line tool to add and get files but you can also run it in daemon mode. It then also opens a HTTP server locally which allows you to use the same URLs as above just with http://localhost:8080 as the schema and host.

2) You can use the ipfs cli tool to add a directory with your sites html and other static content. The client will then give the the root content hash. Then you open /ipfs/$rootHash/index.html or /site2.html and voila! :)

Btw, this article is serving from ipfs. Try 'ipfs get QmNhFJjGcMPqpuYfxL62VVB9528NXqDNMFXiqN5bgFYiZ1' and take a look in that directory on your harddrive. Also: when you now run 'ipfs daemon' your node will help with requests for this content.

3) To update content with a static name, you can use IPNS, it's also mentioned in the article. IIRC: To resolve those entries (and get the latest ipfs content hash) the node with the corresponding key for the ipns entry needs to be online. If it isn't, you get an error like 'Path Resolve error: could not resolve name.'. Maybe come to the #ipfs irc channel on freenode for more specific questions.

Re: Neocities is implementing IPFS – distributed, permanent web

#113
post #111
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea is that people who care most about keeping it up will pin it, or pay to keep it pinned.

Much like they do now by keeping their web server online?

If somebody put something online fifteen years ago, they might not care about it anymore, but I might. With the current web, I can mirror that content by downloading it and putting it on a new server. With this system, that process would be part of the basic workings of the system.

Re: Neocities is implementing IPFS – distributed, permanent web

#114

I absolutely love the concept and the underlying moral reasoning for why we need IPFS! One of the first questions that came to me: Is there any way to add a forward error correcting code, like an erasure code to IPFS? I didn't find any discussion of this in the IPFS paper. This seems somewhat critical to be able to compete with modern centralized storage systems which are likely to use FEC extensively to provide the…

Interesting Idea! I think TAHOE-LAFS also uses something like this?

From a practical standpoint, I'd like my local node to have a full copy so that my friends coming over don't need to reach out to the (maybe offline) internet but I don't see why we shouldn't support encoding the chunked blocks in such a way?

Re: Neocities is implementing IPFS – distributed, permanent web

#115
post #41
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?

You have friends. A script can check your friends, and make suggestions based on that.

You won't have the full graph that Facebook does, but does that really matter? I suspect the best predictors of who your friends are would be people already in your network.

Re: Neocities is implementing IPFS – distributed, permanent web

#116

This reminds me of a feature I sorely miss on my blog (and almost every other blog I visit!) which is for the blogging engine to automatically take a snap-shop of webpages you link to and let users read the cached version at will. If I link to a page and it goes down, or the content changes, it in a way changes the content of my blog too - in an unwanted way that is!

This! I already thought about starting a project for a local browser proxy that builds an index of => $snapshotHash as I go. Maybe mixin readability and metadata like referrals.

I find it quite belittling how browser vendors treat their history features in terms of archival.

Re: Neocities is implementing IPFS – distributed, permanent web

#117
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…

> 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.

Actually, this is exactly what I'm looking for. I want to be able to control my photos and other content, and share that with family and friends.

All data is encrypted and my server can be hosted anywhere (just as simple as setting up a WordPress instance).

My own "news feed" are a combination of all of the other nodes I'm subscribed to.

My problem with Disapora is that they push the "sign up to someone else's pod" rather than "install your personal pod".

It just feels like a multi-centralised model. Rather than one Facebook with my data, now there are 311 "Facebookesque" Diaspora Pods (as of today).

As much as people hate the idea, a WordPress like (PHP) application as a "personal server" would be successful. There are lots of hosting companies out there where you can get up and running for peanuts.

My aim would be for a simple install:

- Download software and upload to hosting company

- Enter MySQL auth details

- Choose local filesystem or third party (S3, DropBox, Google Drive, MS SkyDrive) with OAuth as the backing store (files stored encrypted).

- Finish

Then I would be able to subscribe to other friends and family personal servers, just like RSS feeds. Friends can access my own personal server through OAuth and leave comments on content. Those comments are echoed back in my private feed which is displayed in their merged news feed on their own app instance.

The technology is already there. It just needs someone who is damn good with PHP!

Re: Neocities is implementing IPFS – distributed, permanent web

#118
post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Much like they do now by keeping their web server online?

If somebody put something online fifteen years ago, they might not care about it anymore, but I might. With the current web, I can mirror that content by downloading it and putting it on a new server. With this system, that process would be part of the basic workings of the system.

Sounds somewhat like bittorrent.... as long as there is a "seed" then the content is available, but it falls apart when the last seeder disconnects.

... and it also sounds like usenet, but here everybody is a news server and they selectively host articles.

Re: Neocities is implementing IPFS – distributed, permanent web

#119
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 :)

Somebody with golang-foo, firefox addon experience and a itch might also want to take a look at http://id-rsa.pub/post/go15-calling-go-shared-libs-from-fire...

Re: Neocities is implementing IPFS – distributed, permanent web

#120
post #100

Just reading back though the specification of IPFS, be wary about the claims of 'permanent Web'. Distributed content in IPFS is eventually purged from nodes unless one of the hosting nodes has pinned it to be retained. Therefore, if no-one at Time x views certain content and pins it, then unfortunately at Time x + n that content might disappear just as thoroughly as under HTTP. Unfortunately I fear that means that 'p…

The idea is that people who care most about keeping it up will pin it, or pay to keep it pinned.

If this gets implemented in browsers (native or as an extension) I would hope that bookmarking would serve that purpose. Seems like to logical choice.

Perhaps it is also possible to tweak the caching algorithm to keep track of files that are rare on the network.

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