HTTP is obsolete – it's time for the distributed, permanent web (2015)

Ok cool, I love decentralized content distribution frameworks too. But what do I have to install to use it? As with most of these attempts to decentralization, it fails because of the mostly absent effort spent on ease of use.

Wireguard and the usual tools for file search and retrieval works fine.

Do we need all that comes with IPFS? Not just technically, but the user training and pivot of technical doers?

So many of these projects feel like programmer vanity projects, there’s really little difference between them and a guy on the corner telling me why Protestants are wrong, join his flock.

That it’s a technical project not entirely ephemeral nonsense doesn’t matter; solutions exist already we just don’t implement that way.

I love the idea of IPFS but the last 2 times I tried using it, it simply didnt work. There was no "there" there. The simplest use cases like "I want file X from the ether, make it happen" like you could do with torrents -- nothing ever happened.

I read the docs and tutorials but no luck. Felt like docs were missing some special incantation or setup step, or precondition. Or the CLI wasnt giving me feedback on some blocking error, and it was failing silently. Dunno. Gave up. Hope to revisit some day. Because in theory it would be useful tech to have in my toolbox.

And quite annoyingly, it's the opposite of how IPFS works. IPFS nodes only cache the content as long as it's actively requested. Depending on the cache policy of the node, this can be as short as 24 hours. Yes, it could still exist on your private node that your running from your laptop, but this is the equivalent of saying that all published content is available forever because it's on your hard drive.

Honestly, I like IPFS as a tech, and blockchain isn't useless, but the entire community just makes me want to puke because it's full of so many extremely ignorant people (at best), but mostly just fraudulent liars (at worse and most common).

I wonder how people are incentivized to host content well?

Whether HTTP or IPFS, you want content:

(1) hosted/stored redundantly enough for availability but not over-hosted/stored because that raises costs.

(2) hosted “near” to requesters to make efficient use of the network, which limits costs and increases speed. (Near in terms of the network infrastructure.)

With HTTP I understand how this works (the content publisher figures out a hosting solution balancing what they are willing/able to pay and what kind of availability and speed they want/need).

Not sure with IPFS though. If people are choosing what to host, wouldn’t the hosting be uneven, with some content under-hosted (or not hosted at all) and some popular content greatly over-hosted? …leading to an inefficient system? Under—hosted content would be slow to retrieve or simply unavailable. Over-hosted content is wasting resources, making the system more costly than it needs to be (somebody is paying for the storage and servers to make that storage available).

I realize this a alpha/experimental, but without a strong answer to this, I don’t see how the system can work at scale.