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Show HN: Hearth – A Dropbox-like, IPFS-powered personal website publisher

hearth.eternum.io

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Re: Show HN: Hearth – A Dropbox-like, IPFS-powered personal website publisher

#11

Post by bmcusick »

iagovar wrote: post #10
bmcusick wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not necessarily. IPFS is sort of like Bittorrent on steroids. You can think of yourself as the first seeder of your website, but as long as there are other network participants that have a full copy of your site, your home PC doesn't need to be online for people to access it.

I'm a layman in this stuff, can IPFS sites be accesible from http?

IPFS is its own standard, so your homepage might look like ipfs://blog.iagovar.co

But since most browsers don't support IPFS natively yet there are IPFS gateways that allow you to access IPFS sites through them.

Re: Show HN: Hearth – A Dropbox-like, IPFS-powered personal website publisher

#12

Post by detaro »

iagovar wrote: post #10
bmcusick wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not necessarily. IPFS is sort of like Bittorrent on steroids. You can think of yourself as the first seeder of your website, but as long as there are other network participants that have a full copy of your site, your home PC doesn't need to be online for people to access it.

I'm a layman in this stuff, can IPFS sites be accesible from http?

through gateways, yes. There a bunch of public ones, or you can run your own.

Re: Show HN: Hearth – A Dropbox-like, IPFS-powered personal website publisher

#13

Post by magnetic »

bmcusick wrote: post #5
Xeoncross wrote: post #3

I need to leave my mac running (or install IPFS on a VPS) so that if anyone wants to read my personal site there is a source online that can provide the content right?

Not necessarily. IPFS is sort of like Bittorrent on steroids. You can think of yourself as the first seeder of your website, but as long as there are other network participants that have a full copy of your site, your home PC doesn't need to be online for people to access it.

Right, but when you want to publish something on the internet, wondering (and hoping) whether there is at least one copy out there in the ether is the last thing you want to have to worry about: your site has to be accessible all the time.

In practice, it does mean you need an origin available all the time, and it's either you providing it, or some other service you pay to do it. I don't think there's any magic.

Re: Show HN: Hearth – A Dropbox-like, IPFS-powered personal website publisher

#14

Post by lucideer »

StavrosK wrote: post #8
tomcooks wrote: post #2

Why not use Beaker[0] and achieve the same thing, but on linux and windows too? It has a great community too [0]( http://beakerbrowser.com/ )

It's personal preference, some people will prefer Beaker, we personally liked the "drag some files to a folder and that's it" UX. By the way, I'll mention this here because it isn't evident on the Hearth page right now: You can get your own username on Eternum for free, and it will redirect to the latest hash that Hearth publishes (i.e. the latest version of your website) automatically. You can do this even if you do…

> we personally liked the "drag some files to a folder and that's it" UX.

Beaker does this...

In terms of getting a free username on a HTTP website, https://hashbase.io/

Disclaimer: I haven't used Hearth, so I can't compare, but Beaker doesn't seem like it could be much easier.

Re: Show HN: Hearth – A Dropbox-like, IPFS-powered personal website publisher

#15

Post by zeta0134 »

iagovar wrote: post #10
bmcusick wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not necessarily. IPFS is sort of like Bittorrent on steroids. You can think of yourself as the first seeder of your website, but as long as there are other network participants that have a full copy of your site, your home PC doesn't need to be online for people to access it.

I'm a layman in this stuff, can IPFS sites be accesible from http?

Yes, through any of the publically available IPFS gateways. ipfs.io is one of the more common official ones, but since they're all connected to the same network, in theory the content should be available from any of them. You can also host your own gateway (locally or publically) and point your browser at it.

If you're wanting to make something with DNS in front of it to mask the long IPFS content hashes, you can do that too, there's a good overview of the process in their examples:

https://ipfs.io/docs/examples/example-viewer/example#../webs...

Re: Show HN: Hearth – A Dropbox-like, IPFS-powered personal website publisher

#16

Post by carussell »

Xeoncross wrote: post #3

I need to leave my mac running (or install IPFS on a VPS) so that if anyone wants to read my personal site there is a source online that can provide the content right?

Although not IPFS, Dat[1] is another protocol (associated with Beaker Browser, linked in another comment here), and there's a group trying to build the P2P web on that. In the case of Dat, you can create an account on Hashbase[2], and that will give you a permaseed for your content, even if your device is offline. And then, of course, if you have enough fans they're able to relay your content amongst themselves and any other interested parties who show up.

1. https://datproject.org

2. https://hashbase.io

Re: Show HN: Hearth – A Dropbox-like, IPFS-powered personal website publisher

#17

Post by fiatjaf »

tomcooks wrote: post #2

Why not use Beaker[0] and achieve the same thing, but on linux and windows too? It has a great community too [0]( http://beakerbrowser.com/ )

Ok, but to access a site published on Beaker you must use the Beaker browser, right?

Re: Show HN: Hearth – A Dropbox-like, IPFS-powered personal website publisher

#18

Post by ChrisClark »

Xeoncross wrote: post #3

I need to leave my mac running (or install IPFS on a VPS) so that if anyone wants to read my personal site there is a source online that can provide the content right?

That's the reasoning behind IPFS's Filecoin project. You pay a small fee for people to permanently pin you IPFS content. With incentives for storage providers to have available space, and data duplication. It's set up so that storage providers themselves are 'miners' in the blockchain. Which drives them to compete for the lowest price possible for storage, benefiting users.

Re: Show HN: Hearth – A Dropbox-like, IPFS-powered personal website publisher

#19

Post by StavrosK »

lucideer wrote: post #14
StavrosK wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's personal preference, some people will prefer Beaker, we personally liked the "drag some files to a folder and that's it" UX. By the way, I'll mention this here because it isn't evident on the Hearth page right now: You can get your own username on Eternum for free, and it will redirect to the latest hash that Hearth publishes (i.e. the latest version of your website) automatically. You can do this even if you do…

> we personally liked the "drag some files to a folder and that's it" UX. Beaker does this... In terms of getting a free username on a HTTP website, https://hashbase.io/ Disclaimer: I haven't used Hearth, so I can't compare, but Beaker doesn't seem like it could be much easier.

Oh I see, thanks. I'm not very familiar with Dat/Beaker, but I'll try it out some more, as I missed that mechanic.

Re: Show HN: Hearth – A Dropbox-like, IPFS-powered personal website publisher

#20

Post by StavrosK »

mcjiggerlog wrote: post #9

Looks interesting, but I can't get it to work. I've added some files to my Hearth folder, the menu bar icon changed to the "syncing" state and then seems to have got stuck like that. The finder integration doesn't work either, so I can't copy the Hearth link.

Hmm, that's odd. You're running the app but aren't getting the icon in Finder?
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