HTTP is obsolete – it's time for the distributed, permanent web (2015) • Hacker News Board

Re: HTTP is obsolete – it's time for the distributed, permanent web (2015)

#71

Post by Jasper_ » Sun, Oct 17, 2021, 6:19 PM UTC

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #62

adfrhgeaq5hy wrote: post #58

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…

Imagine if we said that about web sites at the begining. The Web needs to decide what it want to be? A plaftorm to sell stuff? Contact people? Write? Listen to music?

But the web wasn't about listening to music at the start! It started with organizing documents on a network, at CERN. And it took over existing document platforms by adding a simple point-and-click browser user interface to them, inspired by HyperCard (where do you think the "hyperlink" got its name?)

The modern, more economic web, wouldn't come until Netscape added form fields and cookies, at the behest of some of the original owners. And there were a ton of people at Netscape making these decisions about their vision of the future of the web. In-browser music listening wouldn't come until Macromedia, Disney and Microsoft pushed their vision for a "multi-media web"; browsers wouldn't build native support until much, much later.

So yes, we absolutely decided what the web would be about, and built technology to match that vision.

Re: HTTP is obsolete – it's time for the distributed, permanent web (2015)

#72

Post by TuringTest » Sun, Oct 17, 2021, 6:22 PM UTC

Jasper_ wrote: post #63

jeroenhd wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. "It stays in the cache as long as it stays in the cache" ??? What on earth does this mean?

I read it as saying that if someone downloads it before the cache timer deletes it, it resets the timer. So if the file is downloaded regularly, it is never removed from the cache.

Re: HTTP is obsolete – it's time for the distributed, permanent web (2015)

#73

Post by adfrhgeaq5hy » Sun, Oct 17, 2021, 6:22 PM UTC

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #62

adfrhgeaq5hy wrote: post #58

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…

Imagine if we said that about web sites at the begining. The Web needs to decide what it want to be? A plaftorm to sell stuff? Contact people? Write? Listen to music?

Why is it that people trot out this argument in response to any criticism of any technology? You could apply exactly the same sort of reasoning to Microsoft Bob. Do you think that had the potential to be revolutionary?

I can't see the future. I can, however, look at the world and think about what I see.

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

#74

Post by pmlnr » Sun, Oct 17, 2021, 6:24 PM UTC

rackjack wrote: post #65

adfrhgeaq5hy wrote: post #58

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…

Decentralized DNS, apparently: https://handshake.org/

That is based on yet another shitcoin. IPFS is not.

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

#75

Post by corndoge » Sun, Oct 17, 2021, 6:26 PM UTC

Jasper_ wrote: post #71

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine if we said that about web sites at the begining. The Web needs to decide what it want to be? A plaftorm to sell stuff? Contact people? Write? Listen to music?

But the web wasn't about listening to music at the start! It started with organizing documents on a network, at CERN. And it took over existing document platforms by adding a simple point-and-click browser user interface to them, inspired by HyperCard (where do you think the "hyperlink" got its name?) The modern, more economic web, wouldn't come until Netscape added form fields and cookies, at the behest of some of t…

I don't see how the first two paragraphs support your conclusion here

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

#76

Post by hikerclimber1 » Sun, Oct 17, 2021, 6:27 PM UTC

Everything is subjective. Especially laws.

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

#77

Post by d--b » Sun, Oct 17, 2021, 6:30 PM UTC

> it efficiently (20 hops for a network of 10,000,000) finds the nodes that have the data using a Distributed Hash Table

See this is the part I always doubted. I haven’t done the math, but does it really scale up to the size of the internet?

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

#78

Post by riobard » Sun, Oct 17, 2021, 6:30 PM UTC

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?

That was supposed to be solved by FileCoin, i.e. financial incentives to keep content alive.

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

#79

Post by enz » Sun, Oct 17, 2021, 6:30 PM UTC

capableweb wrote: post #4

enz wrote: post #2

> “With HTTP, you search for locations. With IPFS, you search for content.” Well, that's the difference between an URL and an URI, right? HTTP seems URL-oriented while IPFS seems URI-oriented.

Not quite. A URI is any identifier, a URL is a identifier to a location while a URN is identifier only containing a name. IPFS hashes are URIs/URNs while both URLs and URNs are URIs.

Oh, I see. Thanks for the clarification!

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

#80

Post by 0xtr » Sun, Oct 17, 2021, 6:31 PM UTC

I really like IPFS but their standard desktop client sucks big time. I've had a lot of performance problems where it freezes whenever I click a tab or even doesn't go to the tab I click on. It makes the whole experience a lot worse than it needs to.