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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

#171

Post by kitd »

david_ar wrote: post #143
SimplyUseless wrote: post #141

Distribution is a great idea. Decentralizing is a great idea. Open Source is great idea. Permanent.... is a great idea and a very conflicting idea. While the utility of permanent cannot be denied but the implications for privacy, piracy are far reaching.

This isn't freenet where you have no control over what you store. If you have an objection to certain content, you don't have to store it. It's only permanent so long as at least one person is willing to distribute it.

eg. dodgy Snapchat pics your mate's gf sent him?

Transparency can work both ways.

Re: Neocities is implementing IPFS – distributed, permanent web

#173

Post by twoodrow »

I participated in an REU a couple years back working with Named Data Networking. Seems pretty similar... The ahem central problem lies with ourselves: TCP/IP was designed as a communication network, not a distribution network. NDN seeks to be a ubiquitous data distribution network. Iirc, the design helps fend off DDoS.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Named_data_networking http://named-data.net/

Re: Neocities is implementing IPFS – distributed, permanent web

#174

Post by nly »

A universal distributed file system that looks native on my system (thanks to FUSE) and caches content I access locally, while serving it securely to others, is interesting... assuming you can solve key problems like search, identity when you want it, privacy when you dont, and human memorable addressing... which afaict IPFS doesn't address.

The "permanent web" on the other hand you can create using MHT archive files and BitTorrent magnet links. I struggle to get excited about that.

Wake me up when someone figures out how to make apps that require seamless multi-user collaboration, like say distributed clones of HN, Facebook or Github.

Re: Neocities is implementing IPFS – distributed, permanent web

#175

Post by fla »

PhaseMage wrote: post #65

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…

Reminds me how Usenet binaries are often posted along with par2 files.

Reed-Solomon ECC are just amazing!

Re: Neocities is implementing IPFS – distributed, permanent web

#176

Post by reit »

conceit wrote: post #163
kang wrote: post #157

This sounded like many of the bitcoin projects, specially filecoin and upon reading further I came to know it is by the same guys. Similar projects have been in development for past few years such as https://github.com/feross/webtorrent and zeronet This has same problems as the bitcoin infrastructure though: 1. It is unscalable. A page built on IPFS receiving huge inflow of comments would generate many diffs quickly…

1. Don't use it for what's basically messaging 2. I thought torrents can work decentralized e.g. using magnet links and DHTs.

You can still use IPFS for direct messaging though, see http://gateway.ipfs.io/ipfs/QmTkzDwWqPbnAh5YiV5VwcTLnGdwSNsN...

The difference being you're addressing to IPFS node IDs, rather than IP addresses. The advantage here is that your IP address could change (moving datacenters etc.), but your node ID never needs to change. Technically you could just use IPFS for routing to between clients and your standard PHP server, which would still be an improvement over the current approach and would guarantee a DNS whoopsie couldn't redirect your site to China, but you'll get better results (less bandwidth required, guaranteed uptime) by decentralizing as much as you can.

Re: Neocities is implementing IPFS – distributed, permanent web

#177

Post by collinmanderson »

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…

A few questions about IPNS:

- Is it possible to, say, log into my bank account, see my current balance, and set up bill pay?

- Can I order a pizza over IPNS?

- Can I do realtime chat?

Also, this article says we could use Namecoin and not rely on ICANN for DNS, however, you still need ICANN to distribute ip address to get connected to the internet in the first place. Or am I missing something?

Re: Neocities is implementing IPFS – distributed, permanent web

#178

Post by kang »

cjbprime wrote: post #167
kang wrote: post #157

This sounded like many of the bitcoin projects, specially filecoin and upon reading further I came to know it is by the same guys. Similar projects have been in development for past few years such as https://github.com/feross/webtorrent and zeronet This has same problems as the bitcoin infrastructure though: 1. It is unscalable. A page built on IPFS receiving huge inflow of comments would generate many diffs quickly…

> uses bittorrent trackers to identify the nodes in the network It's using a distributed hash table, not trackers. Nothing's completely decentralized; distributed hash tables are pretty good, since you can join them by talking to any participating node at all.

That is true for the data lookup part where DHTs are replacing DNS in a way put still the peers need to discover each other's ip in some way.

I don't know what would be the term for it since it is not completely centralised, as in the nodes collectively form the system without any central coordination, but a new node joining in still needs some information to connect to the network from some source which could be denied-of-service by say a government, so not completely decentralised either.

Re: Neocities is implementing IPFS – distributed, permanent web

#179

Post by kang »

conceit wrote: post #163
kang wrote: post #157

This sounded like many of the bitcoin projects, specially filecoin and upon reading further I came to know it is by the same guys. Similar projects have been in development for past few years such as https://github.com/feross/webtorrent and zeronet This has same problems as the bitcoin infrastructure though: 1. It is unscalable. A page built on IPFS receiving huge inflow of comments would generate many diffs quickly…

1. Don't use it for what's basically messaging 2. I thought torrents can work decentralized e.g. using magnet links and DHTs.

Even DHTs require a server to bootstrap the network, due to a node's unicast nature on the internet.

Re: Neocities is implementing IPFS – distributed, permanent web

#180

Post by Confiks »

kang wrote: post #157

This sounded like many of the bitcoin projects, specially filecoin and upon reading further I came to know it is by the same guys. Similar projects have been in development for past few years such as https://github.com/feross/webtorrent and zeronet This has same problems as the bitcoin infrastructure though: 1. It is unscalable. A page built on IPFS receiving huge inflow of comments would generate many diffs quickly…

As for your first point, you should really first learn more about how IPFS handles content addressing. If you look at section 3.5 the paper[1], you see that a IPFS object consists of a free-form data field, and an arbitrary amount of links to other IPFS objects. This is a very flexible format that allows for caching.

You talk about a page with comments. You could (this is an example) create three 'models': a Page, a PageBody and a Comment (which 'inherit' from IPFSObject). A Page would contain links to one PageBody and multiple Comment objects. Every time a comment is posted, a link is added to the Page object (so its hash changes), but the PageBody (where the majority of the page size presumably is) doesn't have to change. All peers can keep the same PageBody cached, while the latest Page contains all the desired comments. This caching mechanism will also work for unchanged comments.

Every time the Page changes, its hash would be published under some IPNS name, so peers will always retrieve the latest version.

[1] https://github.com/ipfs/papers/raw/master/ipfs-cap2pfs/ipfs-...

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