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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

#61

Post by argvargc »

aaomidi wrote: post #14
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…

There is no technology possible that removes said responsibility. This is how peer to peer systems work. Your criticism is something that no peer to peer system claims to solve.

Except for nearly all blockchain-based p2p networks.

Eg: https://cryptograffiti.info

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

#62

Post by loxias »

oilbagz wrote: post #56

I like this, but I feel its important to point out that this is effectively unusable by the very people who would benefit from it most: non-web developers. If this were a drop-in C/C++ library, I'd use it immediately in my native apps and adopt it as a widespread platform technology. I want to be able to do this, and if it were truly a working technology, I'd put it in every single app I use. But as a Node/JS library…

Amen to this! I too got really excited until I saw it was JavaScript. For me to use it I'd have to link against some sort of JavaScript interpreter (ew) and probably incur performance penalties shoveling the data too and fro.

Can't we just have nice, normal libraries like we used to? Tools that require me to install a huge new build system, package management (cough golang cough) just to run quickly lose their appeal.

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

#63

Post by kyleishie »

christophilus wrote: post #57
oilbagz wrote: post #56

I like this, but I feel its important to point out that this is effectively unusable by the very people who would benefit from it most: non-web developers. If this were a drop-in C/C++ library, I'd use it immediately in my native apps and adopt it as a widespread platform technology. I want to be able to do this, and if it were truly a working technology, I'd put it in every single app I use. But as a Node/JS library…

What is the definition of a toy language? That’s a new term for me. I (thankfully) haven’t written C++ in over 20 years, but if I had to drop back down to a low level language, it’d be C or a compile-to-C language. C is the language these things should target, in my opinion.

> What is the definition of a toy language? That’s a new term for me.

I would imagine most non-compiled, scripting languages. They are ok when building the business logic of an application on top of faster building blocks but not ok for application building blocks such as a database.

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

#64

Post by [deleted] »

oilbagz wrote: post #56

I like this, but I feel its important to point out that this is effectively unusable by the very people who would benefit from it most: non-web developers. If this were a drop-in C/C++ library, I'd use it immediately in my native apps and adopt it as a widespread platform technology. I want to be able to do this, and if it were truly a working technology, I'd put it in every single app I use. But as a Node/JS library…

[deleted]

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

#65

Post by calibas »

FeepingCreature wrote: post #38
calibas wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He said that IPFS hosting is the "primary responsibility of a single party". The whole idea behind peer to peer is to avoid precisely that.

Not really, if you want something to be perpetually available in any p2p network you need to ensure that you're still hosting it. That goes for torrents, ed2k, freenet, and ipfs too.

I'm not claiming the reality of P2P always matches the ideas behind it.

And surely you're not saying centralized hosting being a strict requirement was what people had in mind for P2P?

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

#66

Post by amw-zero »

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 feel like you don't understand the definition of "peer to peer."

The fact that you require nodes to ultimate do the hosting of data does not make IPFS centralized.

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

#67

Post by kevincox »

encryptluks2 wrote: post #8
aaomidi wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you think decentralized means? It means that hosting it isn't the responsibility of a single party. If I put something online, and people think it's interesting and pin it. Even if I go down, the pinned content remains up. Decentralized doesn't magically solve hosting availability. It just removes responsibility from a single party.

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…

Of course. Just using IPFS doesn't make other people interested in your content. But if you have interesting content it does mean that people will be likely to save it.

You can imagine that if YouTube hosted its videos on IPFS then popular channels would be widely pinned so that even if YouTube shut down and the channel author left most of the videos would still be accessible. And much unlike current HTTP mirrors you would be able to find out who is pinning it without having to check multiple archive sites. (Of course you need to know the hash, but remembering hashes is much lest costly than mirroring whole sites yourself so I think we would see lots of these)

I think that in most cases it is simplest to think of IPFS as torrents. I think the biggest improvement that IPFS made was a single namespace for content instead of each torrent basically being its own swarm. This means that you can find content no matter how it is packaged and you can share blocks between "torrents".

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

#69

Post by antman »

oilbagz wrote: post #56

I like this, but I feel its important to point out that this is effectively unusable by the very people who would benefit from it most: non-web developers. If this were a drop-in C/C++ library, I'd use it immediately in my native apps and adopt it as a widespread platform technology. I want to be able to do this, and if it were truly a working technology, I'd put it in every single app I use. But as a Node/JS library…

I would play with some Python.

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

#70

Post by loxias »

antman wrote: post #69
oilbagz wrote: post #56

I like this, but I feel its important to point out that this is effectively unusable by the very people who would benefit from it most: non-web developers. If this were a drop-in C/C++ library, I'd use it immediately in my native apps and adopt it as a widespread platform technology. I want to be able to do this, and if it were truly a working technology, I'd put it in every single app I use. But as a Node/JS library…

I would play with some Python.

Me too! But the thing is, a vanilla C library can be used by anything. It's the lowest common denominator. I can easily call into a C library from Python, Perl,... MATLAB... and I don't know JavaScript but I bet it's not hard from there either. That can't be said about any other language.

Performance is oft cited as why systems software is written in C (or C++ with C bindings), but I think a much stronger reason is the universality. C runs on everything from big iron to the smallest microcontroller.

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