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Peer-to-Peer Databases for the Decentralized Web

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Re: Peer-to-Peer Databases for the Decentralized Web

#41

Post by bawolff »

encryptluks2 wrote: post #4

I don't see how people consider this and IPFS decentralized. You still need peers to subscribe and pin, and services like Pinata aren't cheap and still centralized. Is there an example of websites that would continue to run indefinitely if there wasn't a centralization of services with IPFS? I just don't think it is likely unless you start distributing your app that bundles IPFS, so that your users end up hosting it…

I think that's the big problem with the "decentralized" WWW movement. There are about a billion conflicting definitions of decentralized providing very different properties, and it's never clear which definition people mean.

Re: Peer-to-Peer Databases for the Decentralized Web

#42

Post by random_kris »

hosh wrote: post #9
encryptluks2 wrote: post #4

I don't see how people consider this and IPFS decentralized. You still need peers to subscribe and pin, and services like Pinata aren't cheap and still centralized. Is there an example of websites that would continue to run indefinitely if there wasn't a centralization of services with IPFS? I just don't think it is likely unless you start distributing your app that bundles IPFS, so that your users end up hosting it…

I'm looking at integrating IPFS with sandstorm (sandstorm.io). The sandstorm (and other homelab/homeserver) community have an interest in self-hosting. IPFS allows people that are interested in seeing something stored to pin it themselves. But yes: bundling IPFS with the app is pretty much what would need to happen. As they are now, neither the IPFS ecosystem or sandstorm are really decentralized -- or maybe I should…

I was also looking at sandstorm. I even managed to install it on my homeserver. But it is sadly not really up to date. As a replacement i found homelabOS which is a bit more complicated (I think).

And I was also thinking about integrating ipfs into my homeserver stack. But instead of plain ipfs I was thinking about sia coin. They offer cloud storage. So I was thinking about to rent 4tb of space. And whatever money I make with it I use it to buy backup from sia.

So in a sense I provide backups to others and in return I get free backup.

Sadly work is being to intensive on last month so I haven't found much inspiration in completing stuff above.

Re: Peer-to-Peer Databases for the Decentralized Web

#43

Post by [deleted] »

beaconstudios wrote: post #16
hosh wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been wondering the same thing too! Maybe if there is a way to share indexes, or some way to put out a call for searches through the DHT, and then the requestor aggregates the results. A couple examples: Web crawler -- seeded through a curated or personal bookmark list. Knowledge base -- the permaculture community have amassed a knowledge base on growing plants: USDA hardiness zones, heat zones, humidity, soil re…

Limewire had an interesting protocol for exactly this back in the day, over its Gnutella network. I don't know if it scales to search engine sizes (most things don't, especially distributed) but there's at least some prior production grade work in this space. Edit: having just double checked it looks like Gnutella predates limewire; that's just the avenue through which I came across it.

[deleted]

Re: Peer-to-Peer Databases for the Decentralized Web

#45

Post by [deleted] »

calibas wrote: post #34
encryptluks2 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say there are very few IPFS sites where hosting doesn't still end up being the primary responsibility of a single party. That was the point I was trying to make. If you have to pay someone else to pin it and keep giving them funds then it is still your responsibility. If you have a website that you want to scale and load fast for all your users on IPFS then it will still end up being your responsibility. Ther…

You're speaking from actual experience, aren't you? I tried out IPFS and came to the same conclusion myself. Content has to be kept alive or it disappears forever, and keeping it alive requires some kind of investment. I like IPFS, I want it to succeed, but HN has these romantic ideas about IPFS that don't quite match reality, and you get downvoted for being honest sometimes. Not acknowledging the limits of IPFS are…

[deleted]

Re: Peer-to-Peer Databases for the Decentralized Web

#46

Post by encryptluks2 »

calibas wrote: post #34
encryptluks2 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say there are very few IPFS sites where hosting doesn't still end up being the primary responsibility of a single party. That was the point I was trying to make. If you have to pay someone else to pin it and keep giving them funds then it is still your responsibility. If you have a website that you want to scale and load fast for all your users on IPFS then it will still end up being your responsibility. Ther…

You're speaking from actual experience, aren't you? I tried out IPFS and came to the same conclusion myself. Content has to be kept alive or it disappears forever, and keeping it alive requires some kind of investment. I like IPFS, I want it to succeed, but HN has these romantic ideas about IPFS that don't quite match reality, and you get downvoted for being honest sometimes. Not acknowledging the limits of IPFS are…

Yes. I really enjoy IPFS and fully intend to use it in my next project, but there is still quite a bit to be desired. I think the IPFS cluster project may end up being what I'm looking for, but it currently has a few issues that need to be worked out:

https://github.com/ipfs/ipfs-cluster/issues/1226

Ideally, I could provide instructions for app users to follow my cluster, set the amount of content they want to share, track the size of content they've pinned and for how long, and provide rewards/incentives through the app for doing so.. similar to how private trackers work.

Re: Peer-to-Peer Databases for the Decentralized Web

#47

Post by encryptluks2 »

t3rr0r wrote: post #31
encryptluks2 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To an extent, although many times you still rely on a centralized tracker and dedicated seeds. Unless you belong to a private tracker where users are forced to maintain certain ratios to continue using a service, then in most cases a torrent will end up like an IPFS site without any pins. If IPFS provided the ability to track pins from users of a site like private trackers, and provide rewards or some incentive then…

you're describing an architecture similar to a project I'm working on using orbitdb/ipfslog - it's not quite ready for sharing/using but there's more information here: https://www.reddit.com/r/musichoarder/comments/lrqx7m/record...

Thanks. Napster 3.0 here we come ;)

Re: Peer-to-Peer Databases for the Decentralized Web

#48

Post by jimpick »

hosh wrote: post #9
encryptluks2 wrote: post #4

I don't see how people consider this and IPFS decentralized. You still need peers to subscribe and pin, and services like Pinata aren't cheap and still centralized. Is there an example of websites that would continue to run indefinitely if there wasn't a centralization of services with IPFS? I just don't think it is likely unless you start distributing your app that bundles IPFS, so that your users end up hosting it…

I'm looking at integrating IPFS with sandstorm (sandstorm.io). The sandstorm (and other homelab/homeserver) community have an interest in self-hosting. IPFS allows people that are interested in seeing something stored to pin it themselves. But yes: bundling IPFS with the app is pretty much what would need to happen. As they are now, neither the IPFS ecosystem or sandstorm are really decentralized -- or maybe I should…

I've been doing some experimentation along the same lines ... I've got a small proof-of-concept working where I can sync Earthstar databases between multiple Sandstorm instances - each "grain" acts as a pub, and you can use "webkeys" as pubs. I'm using powerbox-http-proxy to request capabilities for connections, so it works even with fully sandboxed client-side networking (ALLOW_LEGACY_RELAXED_CSP=false). It's maddeningly complex to do simple networking, but it's amazing to have the security layer there. I'll put together a blog post / video soonish.

https://github.com/jimpick/sandstorm-earthstar-foyer

Sandstorm is very interesting for privacy-focused peer-to-peer because it has the tools in place to sandbox networking. The networking security model is designed to prevent things from talking to each other without user approvals - so it's extra tricky to do peer-to-peer things with it.

I'm excited to try to stick some of my old IPFS/IPLD/libp2p/Dat/CRDT things into Sandstorm - there's a tonne of interesting things that could be done with it.

Re: Peer-to-Peer Databases for the Decentralized Web

#49

Post by saurik »

encryptluks2 wrote: post #4

I don't see how people consider this and IPFS decentralized. You still need peers to subscribe and pin, and services like Pinata aren't cheap and still centralized. Is there an example of websites that would continue to run indefinitely if there wasn't a centralization of services with IPFS? I just don't think it is likely unless you start distributing your app that bundles IPFS, so that your users end up hosting it…

It is decentralized in that anyone can step up and host the content on IPFS and it is considered equivalent and secure. With a normal website, if the canonical host goes down, someone else can host it, but it isn't the same website.

Re: Peer-to-Peer Databases for the Decentralized Web

#50

Post by Geee »

encryptluks2 wrote: post #4

I don't see how people consider this and IPFS decentralized. You still need peers to subscribe and pin, and services like Pinata aren't cheap and still centralized. Is there an example of websites that would continue to run indefinitely if there wasn't a centralization of services with IPFS? I just don't think it is likely unless you start distributing your app that bundles IPFS, so that your users end up hosting it…

IPFS, torrents and many old-school p2p-networks are decentralized to an extent, but they're also non-sybil-resistant and voluntarist, which makes them unsuitable for many use cases. They're not really a part of what is meant by decentralized web.

You should take a look at SkyDB to get an idea what's possible with true decentralization: https://blog.sia.tech/skydb-a-mutable-database-for-the-decen...

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