Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why build this blog, or anything, on IPFS?

teetotality.blog

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 156 posts

Re: Why build this blog, or anything, on IPFS?

#31

Post by kordlessagain »

kalmi10 wrote: post #30

The thing I worry about with IPFS is privacy. If you use IPFS directly (as intended, not via a public gateway), and you visit a site, then you are automatically going to be seeding (like a torrent) the visited content, and thus you will be announcing/broadcasting the fact to the world that you (your node/your IP) have visited it. My current understanding is that this cannot really be avoided, since one needs to be ab…

IPFS isn't designed for private communications. It's designed for highly decentralized publishing of content. Safe, in this context, means the data is safe to "be".

Re: Why build this blog, or anything, on IPFS?

#32

Post by furi »

nullstyle wrote: post #29

IPFS still has a long way to go until it is useable in my opinion. The default configuration for the desktop client will gladly keep open 1000+ peer connections and will happily degrade your usual internet experience. In addition the ecosystem is filled with technical/community debt that makes navigating the system a nightmare for anyone who isn't an expert. As an example: https://github.com/ipfs/go-ipfs/issues/1482…

To add to this there are* serious issues with naming. I wrote an app that ran on IPFS last year and throughout testing there was a persistent problem with needing to issue the testers with a new hash/link for each new version because IPNS, IPFS' decentralized naming solution, effectively doesn't work. It's supposed to give each node a unique name which can be repeatedly mapped to different hashes but publishing a new name -> hash mapping can take several minutes and then lookup of that name can take several minutes even on the node that published it in the first place. Names also need to be republished every 24 hours or so or they disappear from the network, which in my opinion harms the claims of decentralization.

* = unless something has radically changed in the last few months and they just haven't closed the GitHub issue: https://github.com/ipfs/go-ipfs/issues/3860

Re: Why build this blog, or anything, on IPFS?

#33

Post by mirimir »

kalmi10 wrote: post #30

The thing I worry about with IPFS is privacy. If you use IPFS directly (as intended, not via a public gateway), and you visit a site, then you are automatically going to be seeding (like a torrent) the visited content, and thus you will be announcing/broadcasting the fact to the world that you (your node/your IP) have visited it. My current understanding is that this cannot really be avoided, since one needs to be ab…

Well, one can use IPFS through Tor, and use gateways that are Tor onion services.

Re: Why build this blog, or anything, on IPFS?

#34

Post by indigodaddy »

kalmi10 wrote: post #30

The thing I worry about with IPFS is privacy. If you use IPFS directly (as intended, not via a public gateway), and you visit a site, then you are automatically going to be seeding (like a torrent) the visited content, and thus you will be announcing/broadcasting the fact to the world that you (your node/your IP) have visited it. My current understanding is that this cannot really be avoided, since one needs to be ab…

The other potential possibility/issue that I would be uncomfortable with, would be a bad actor visiting and then seeding my content. Say someone also seeding or just locally having child pornography or some other nefarious thing, and now they are also an aggregator for your non-nefarious content. Just the possibility of that type of potential unintended association gives me pause in terms of considering it for a blog or whatever else.

Re: Why build this blog, or anything, on IPFS?

#35

Post by kalmi10 »

kordlessagain wrote: post #31
kalmi10 wrote: post #30

The thing I worry about with IPFS is privacy. If you use IPFS directly (as intended, not via a public gateway), and you visit a site, then you are automatically going to be seeding (like a torrent) the visited content, and thus you will be announcing/broadcasting the fact to the world that you (your node/your IP) have visited it. My current understanding is that this cannot really be avoided, since one needs to be ab…

IPFS isn't designed for private communications. It's designed for highly decentralized publishing of content. Safe, in this context, means the data is safe to "be".

I understand that no one is going to tamper with the data. Everybody (who is running a full node) is gonna get what they ask for, but then they are gonna go and announce it to the world that they have it, and that worries me privacy-wise.

Re: Why build this blog, or anything, on IPFS?

#37

Post by Polylactic_acid »

johannes1234321 wrote: post #6
rohan1024 wrote: post #3

> even go super old-school and run a web server at home. It's not as if we're short on options in 2020. Though it's old school, it's incredibly difficult to run server at home now at least in India. The network I connect to is behind a NAT which is behind another NAT. At least that's what I saw when I tried to host my blog on Raspberry PI at home over a year ago. Ultimately I gave up on that endeavor. If anyone has s…

Your ISP implementing IPv6 won't be enough: One can't reach it from the outside, as long as not "everybody" else has IPv6.

You don't need everyone on IPv6. Just most people. Then it becomes the issue of those still on v4

Re: Why build this blog, or anything, on IPFS?

#38

Post by Polylactic_acid »

kordlessagain wrote: post #31
kalmi10 wrote: post #30

The thing I worry about with IPFS is privacy. If you use IPFS directly (as intended, not via a public gateway), and you visit a site, then you are automatically going to be seeding (like a torrent) the visited content, and thus you will be announcing/broadcasting the fact to the world that you (your node/your IP) have visited it. My current understanding is that this cannot really be avoided, since one needs to be ab…

IPFS isn't designed for private communications. It's designed for highly decentralized publishing of content. Safe, in this context, means the data is safe to "be".

Honestly I think the simplest and most effective method is to keep things as they are and have archive.org/.is keep backups of websites. A backup on archive.org is much more likely to stick around after 10 years than the users seeding a file.

Re: Why build this blog, or anything, on IPFS?

#39

Post by tunesmith »

endothrowho333 wrote: post #7

It's pieces like these that remind me why good writing skills are important, and one shouldn't stray from the basics unless they're fully aware of the trade-offs. For this article, it would be: write a better hook, and make sure to include a rudimentary thesis statement, because I wasn't able to deduce what you were trying to persuade me of, within the first few paragraphs. With a title like "Why build this blog -- o…

My goodness, this is harsh. I was thinking it was a very well-written article and I appreciated its clarity.

Re: Why build this blog, or anything, on IPFS?

#40

Post by kalmi10 »

mirimir wrote: post #33
kalmi10 wrote: post #30

The thing I worry about with IPFS is privacy. If you use IPFS directly (as intended, not via a public gateway), and you visit a site, then you are automatically going to be seeding (like a torrent) the visited content, and thus you will be announcing/broadcasting the fact to the world that you (your node/your IP) have visited it. My current understanding is that this cannot really be avoided, since one needs to be ab…

Well, one can use IPFS through Tor, and use gateways that are Tor onion services.

Good point about the experimental Tor support and the Onion IPFS gateways.

Is there a reasonable way to use untrusted gateways while upholding the data integrity guarantees? I think it should be possible in theory.

Post reply on HN