IPFS is the Distributed Web

> Yea, this is where you're mistaken. It cannot make you distribute anything!

Oh, really?

"In some cases, nodes must work for their blocks. In the case that a node has nothing that its peers want (or nothing at all), it seeks the pieces its peers want, with lower priority than what the node wants itself. This incentivizes nodes to cache and disseminate rare pieces, even if they are not interested in them directly."

https://github.com/ipfs/papers/blob/master/ipfs-cap2pfs/ipfs...

What's to say BitSwap won't proactively decide to download and start seeding some rare pieces of kiddy porn?

> You only distribute what you download.

As if that wasn't bad enough.

> Don't download kiddy porn, and you won't distribute kiddy porn.

How are you to know if a hash contains kiddy porn or not?

You need to know if the hash contains kiddy porn before you download it, but to know if it contains kiddy porn you have to download it. Classic Catch-22.

The only rational response to a system like this is not to use it.

> How does BitTorrent protect me from unknowingly downloading kiddy porn?

By not randomly downloading stuff from the Internet. By only downloading torrents, I have explicitly chosen to retrieve (hopefully from vetted and reputable sources). By giving me complete control and feedback on what I'm seeding.

Obviously not ideal, but far better than what IPFS does.

I also don't get how this central censorship authority is going to work. I very much doubt IPFS wants to become the Internet Police for Saudi Arabia.

The whole thing is a futile attempt to appease lawmakers and dictators, since any filtering will be done clientside. Nothing is stopping the client from ignoring any blacklists.

Any great or small firewall will just find it easier to block the whole thing than do some silly whack-a-mole deep packet inspection.

How is IPFS not going to become a haven for kiddy porn aficionados?

If the censorship authority publishes a list of blacklisted hashes, that's the same as publishing a directory of all the available kiddy porn. Oops!

If the censorship authority requires each hash to be queried individually, it becomes a real honeypot for the state surveillance machinery.

Not exactly great choices.

It's trivial to provision a mobile device with 128GB+ storage these days.

Non-mobile devices start at $5. A considerable server is <$100. Even only modest amounts of server persistence allow for a powerful distributed net.

That was the initially scoped solution. It turned out that a lot of other actors had information management & sharing problems of a similar scope. Well before commercialisation of the Web.

There are a few other issues.

One is discoverability. It's tough to find a bunch of scattered systems all over the place. That's a problem Facebook, Reddit, and HN address.

Another is identity. Tracking who's doing what (and what their permissions/authorities are) over a bunch of sites is ... a pain. I'm still mulling over a comment a few days back on HN that a user had 770 different password-based identities in their accounts-management storage (personal).

Search (related to the first) is a third -- spiders suck a lot of bandwidth. Unless there's some way to distribute search or allow nodes to self-report search elements (which will probably require some form of auditing).

And there's administration. It's really easy create systems any idiot can use, but then, any idiot will, and DDoS Brian Krebs and Dyn. Bulletproof administration is a real pain point.

You and me both, brat.

I'm slowly realising a fundamental truth of economics: whatever it is you're making cheaper, you're going to have one hell of a lot more of.

And as you increase the quantity, you'll start bumping into limiting factors elsewhere. E.g., cheaper transport => far more congestion. Cheaper communications => more advertising. Cheaper storage => vastly more surveillance and monitoring. Cheaper telecoms => vastly more phone solicitations and scams.

There's the question of what people really need to access -- and here I think it's key to go back to Maslow's Hierarchy. And to acknowledge our human limitations of information capacity per day. Several sources I've seen (Stephen Wolfram, Walt Mossberg) suggest about 150 - 300 email messages/day, and something less than even a cursory glance at 800 comments (The New York Times's comments moderation team). How do you provide a manageable and significant set of information to people?

I've also started noting that our-so-called discussion systems themselves (Slashdot, Facebook, Reddit, even HN) are pretty poor at self-supporting useful user feedback. Almost as if that's not their true function.