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WebRTC Chat on IPFS

ipfs.io

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Re: WebRTC Chat on IPFS

#71

Post by ac4tw »

viach wrote: post #25
detaro wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a bunch of these things, regrettably.

For example, could you please provide at least 3 (a bunch) examples which are in production?

I don't think there are any 3 that are exactly what you ask about ("chat-on-blockchain thing").

However, from my understanding of Telegram's ICO and "leaked" roadmap, they appear to be doing a decentralized chat the may leverage their own blockchain for some features (identity, tokens etc.).

I think Status.im is another example, but it's currently early access I believe.

My own product, stealthy.im could be another example. The web product is in production. It builds upon blockstack, storing identity and storage pointers in the blockchain.

So that's 3. I could probably list a few more, but again they wouldn't strictly satisfy your precise criteria in one or major ways. I think @jerf's response is really good--for us the "why" of blockchain is in identity and providing a verifiable decentralized storage network through blockstack. The underlying bitcoin blockchain wouldn't be suitable for message storage or sdp handshaking due to latency as another person pointed out.

Re: WebRTC Chat on IPFS

#72

Post by jadbox »

tlrobinson wrote: post #58
pasta wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it doesn't mean peer-to-peer here. It means that there is no one server but a lot and in fact the 'server' is abstracted away from the developer so he sees no server (serverless). I think Wikipedia has a nice explanation of the term: Serverless computing is a cloud-computing execution model in which the cloud provider dynamically manages the allocation of machine resources. Pricing is based on the actual amount of…

So... a PaaS?

yep, just reversed now: SaaP... Serverless as a Platform

Re: WebRTC Chat on IPFS

#73

Post by wefawefsdf »

jstanley wrote: post #19

> That means the "servers" hosting it are distributed across a wide network. This is a strange way of saying "you're looking at this site through one centralised server hosted at ipfs.io". Don't get me wrong, IPFS is great. I have released an application that works over IPFS. But I don't think obscuring the difference between a gateway and a node is beneficial. I think the difference needs to be highlighted front and…

what? your comment is exactly wrong..

The content is being served by many peers on the network. You find the peers through a gateway - ipfs.io is one such gateway but any peer can also act as a gateway.

Re: WebRTC Chat on IPFS

#74

Post by derefr »

StavrosK wrote: post #11
timlyo wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's serverless in that there is no specific server running it. The website is distributed across Ipfs and the chat is peer-to-peer.

I don't know man, when we say "defenseless", we mean it has no defense. "Useless", it has no use. We don't mean "it has so many uses that you can't really pick one". That would be "useful", I guess, which is pretty much the opposite.

People effectively map “server” to mean “centralization botteneck” or “Single Point Of Failure” these days. In both of those senses, this system is “serverless.”

Re: WebRTC Chat on IPFS

#75

Post by rounce »

jarfil wrote: post #42
StavrosK wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know man, when we say "defenseless", we mean it has no defense. "Useless", it has no use. We don't mean "it has so many uses that you can't really pick one". That would be "useful", I guess, which is pretty much the opposite.

"Priceless" has so much price that you can't pick up one.

It means that the price cannot be meaningfully quantified en masse, the price is set at the moment of purchase.

Art is a good example of this as it generally has no immediate utility, and even it cultural significance is created less by the piece itself, but rather by it's philosophical foundation which is not part of the purchase (nor even ownable).

The Mona Lisa may be 'priceless', but all the money in the world is just a lot of money.

Re: WebRTC Chat on IPFS

#76

Post by jstanley »

wefawefsdf wrote: post #73
jstanley wrote: post #19

> That means the "servers" hosting it are distributed across a wide network. This is a strange way of saying "you're looking at this site through one centralised server hosted at ipfs.io". Don't get me wrong, IPFS is great. I have released an application that works over IPFS. But I don't think obscuring the difference between a gateway and a node is beneficial. I think the difference needs to be highlighted front and…

what? your comment is exactly wrong.. The content is being served by many peers on the network. You find the peers through a gateway - ipfs.io is one such gateway but any peer can also act as a gateway.

When you visit the page via ipfs.io you are viewing it via the ipfs.io gateway. The ipfs.io gateway has complete power to censor content, serve malicious content, etc.

You lose most of the benefits of IPFS if you browse via a gateway controlled by somebody else.

You don't find peers through a gateway. A gateway is literally just an IPFSHTTP gateway. The gateway does all the IPFS stuff and just serves content to you over normal HTTP.

Re: WebRTC Chat on IPFS

#78

Post by StavrosK »

derefr wrote: post #74
StavrosK wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know man, when we say "defenseless", we mean it has no defense. "Useless", it has no use. We don't mean "it has so many uses that you can't really pick one". That would be "useful", I guess, which is pretty much the opposite.

People effectively map “server” to mean “centralization botteneck” or “Single Point Of Failure” these days. In both of those senses, this system is “serverless.”

Why do we need to keep inventing new terms, though? We have perfectly apt terms already, "decentralized" and "distributed", with much more exact meanings.

Re: WebRTC Chat on IPFS

#79

Post by detaro »

ac4tw wrote: post #70
viach wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for providing an example. It's not a "bunch" but still. Could you explain why did you use word "regrettably", is it a bad thing these projects exists?

I think @detaro says 'regrettably' because of the distaste many have about ICOs and the hype related to them. However, I too would like to hear from @detaro on this.

Pretty much, yeah: pushing actual messaging over a blockchain is just horribly inefficient and I don't see it being a workable idea, so it seems dishonest to me to widely promote it and collect money for it.

Other related things are fine: e.g. mapping public keys to human-readable identifiers like a nickname is a good match to what a blockchain is good at, I get why people like the idea of cryptocoin-payments in a messenger platform, ... Still leaves the general concern of "does this really need it's own coin with an ICO and hype", but at least the ideas make some sense there.

Re: WebRTC Chat on IPFS

#80

Post by derefr »

StavrosK wrote: post #78
derefr wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People effectively map “server” to mean “centralization botteneck” or “Single Point Of Failure” these days. In both of those senses, this system is “serverless.”

Why do we need to keep inventing new terms, though? We have perfectly apt terms already, "decentralized" and "distributed", with much more exact meanings.

Well, "distributed, decentralized, peer-to-peer network" worked well enough, back when, to differentiate e.g. Kademlia from Napster.

But interestingly, people also called BitTorrent a "distributed, decentralized, peer-to-peer network", even though BitTorrent requires trackers. None of those adjectives allow the differentiation of the Kademlia design (a network of dumb nodes with smart, active clients that walk them) from the BitTorrent design (a network containing both dumb client nodes and smart server nodes, where the clients register with the servers.)

"Serverless" is the word for what Kademlia is and (pre-DHT) BitTorrent isn't. Or what differentiates a wireless mesh routing system from a 1980s BBS store-and-forward architecture. Or what differentiates IPFS from, say, the network consisting of all Lotus Notes clients + all Lotus Domino servers.

(The funny thing is that AWS Lambda is not "serverless" by this definition. AWS Lambda is just a PaaS with a CGI-alike ABI. Now, if Lambda was an ABI standard; and everyone ran a mesh of their own Lambda nodes; and your newly deployed Lambda function could end up running on any random node, without a first-class "server"/second-class "client" node separation; then that'd be "serverless." It'd also basically be Ethereum or Urbit or another of those wacky architectures, rather than Lambda any more.)

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