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HTTP is obsolete – it's time for the distributed, permanent web (2015)

ipfs.io

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Re: HTTP is obsolete – it's time for the distributed, permanent web (2015)

#51

Post by abecedarius »

unnouinceput wrote: post #37

So, they reinvented torrents? Or old timers, do you remember the peer-to-peer connection from 90's called DC++ ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DC%2B%2B )? Like this IPFS, you'd connect to a hub (IPFS calls this a node) and get what people were sharing. This IPFS only takes that step a little further with hashing and distributing. Also, if this gets implemented widely, hash collision is going to be wild

BitTorrent was invented to cut down the scope of an earlier IPFS-ish system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mnet_(peer-to-peer_network)#Ev...

It's reasonable to try again at the bigger goals now that there's more infrastructure / theoretical progress / audience.

Re: HTTP is obsolete – it's time for the distributed, permanent web (2015)

#52

Post by CuriousCosmic »

vmception wrote: post #44
CharlesW wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The irony is that this and other IPFS problems will (must?) be fixed by recentralization. Cloudflare is doing this with IPFS Gateway, and Google will surely embrace/extend/usurp IPFS if it becomes popular. The user experience of bare IPFS is just not good enough.

I agree with a [previously] dead/deleted commented at this level: "Doesn't matter. the point of ipfs is that when cloudflare and google shut down their gateway, the ipfs content is still available at the same address."

This really is one of the cruxes of decentralisation being built in at the protocol level. Even if centralised services exist, as long as one person exists who cares, the content lives on.

Without decentralisation being supported at the protocol level, as soon as the host dies, it's gone. This is particularly problematic because centralised services slowly subsume small services/sites and this either cuts off the flow to the other small sites or eventually something changes on the big centralised site and a bunch of these little sites break.

Re: HTTP is obsolete – it's time for the distributed, permanent web (2015)

#53

Post by noman-land »

doliveira wrote: post #41

On a side note, do you all know about some research or PoC in the direction of a globally distributed knowledge graph or something of sorts? Or at least a more technical name I could google. I think it's so bad that so much of the Internet information is siloed in walled gardens and that pages have to be dynamically generated and routed across the globe every single time... Imagine how it's gonna be when we get to Ma…

There's a project at MIT that seems to be precisely this. Underlay.

https://underlay.mit.edu/

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

#55

Post by SavantIdiot »

CharlesW wrote: post #23

The author claims that IPFS enables a "permanent web" and eliminates 404-like experiences. How does IPFS guarantee that all published content will be available forever? (In my beginner-level knowledge of IPFS, this is the first I've heard that claim. It seems absurd.)

Simple: you set up a few centralized servers with backups...

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

#56

Post by zinodaur »

jeroenhd wrote: post #13
spicybright wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wonder if it's practical to "buffer" popular content on IPFS by copying it to normal HTTP servers. Requesting an IPFS document would query a few popular repositories, then revert back to normal IPFS if it's not found. These buffer servers would also track what's popular and shuffle around what they store accordingly.

I think this is exactly what Cloudflare's and ipfs.io's web proxies do. They won't cache your stuff forever, but they'll cache it as long as someone requests the content again before the content gets removed from cache. The downside of this approach is that it only works with popular nodes and you'd be back to the old, centralised internet architecture for all real use cases. I don't think you can accurately gauge wh…

How much were you paying for your IPFS pin? E.g., if you are getting something via HTTP, there's a server somewhere with that content just waiting for you to request it, typically stored on an SSD, etc. V.s. IPFS pins which are typically packed on to massive disks shared with lots of other people

IDK a whole lot about IPFS though. Maybe it was the metadata resolving / DHT lookup or whatever that was super slow. BitTorrent latency was always pretty high, but it didn't matter because throughput was also high

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

#58

Post by adfrhgeaq5hy »

IPFS needs to decide what it wants to be. Is it about being a decentralized caching layer? Is it about permanently storing content? Is it about replacing my web server? Is it about replacing DNS? Is it about censorship resistance?

Right now it does none of those things well. The client chews through CPU and memory when seemingly doing nothing. If I try to download content, it is far slower than BitTorrent unless I go through a centralized gateway. If I add content it takes ages to propagate, making it utterly unsuitable as a replacement for a web server. There is no system to keep content alive so links will still die. The name system is byzantine and I don't think anyone uses it.

Unfortunately, they are now unable to pivot because they did that asinine ICO. The right thing to do is to give up on the FileCoin nonsense and build a system that solves a problem better than anything else, but that is no longer allowed because they already sold something else to their "investors"

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

#59

Post by sergiotapia »

xwdv wrote: post #46
Zababa wrote: post #34

So IPFS is basically some kind of automatic behind-the-scene torrenting? I see how that solves the "dead server" problem, but how does that solves the "content longevity" problem?

Incentives must be created for storing content. Imagine if each request was really more like a bounty where the requester would pay the host when the file is delivered.

This is what I'm saying. If there's a financial incentive to store popular content, or a higher incentive to host "at-risk" content this would work out, no?

I have no idea how hard this would be to implement. I'm new to ipfs and crypto.

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

#60

Post by diegocg »

CharlesW wrote: post #23

The author claims that IPFS enables a "permanent web" and eliminates 404-like experiences. How does IPFS guarantee that all published content will be available forever? (In my beginner-level knowledge of IPFS, this is the first I've heard that claim. It seems absurd.)

Basically with ipfs you try to download some content by referring to it by a hash. This means that the content will be available forever - as long as there is someone willing to cache that content. Which is, obviously, something that won't always happen. But it _can_ theoretically happen, so people with a cache of some old web page may revive it, even after the original site is gone.
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