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HTTP is obsolete – it's time for the distributed, permanent web (2015)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Re: HTTP is obsolete – it's time for the distributed, permanent web (2015)

#81

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

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?

I think that the question of what user-facing purpose(s) a technology can be put to is somehow qualitatively different than what backend roles it might play. I could be wrong.

Re: HTTP is obsolete – it's time for the distributed, permanent web (2015)

#82

Post by wly_cdgr »

noman-land wrote: post #50
jeroenhd wrote: post #3

I like IPFS, I really do, but whenever I try to use it, it's either too slow to become usable or sometimes it plain doesn't work. I pinned a whole bunch of files on IPFS a while back to experiment with it and the system seems to work, but every time I try to fetch those resources from a location that hasn't cached the content yet, it takes several seconds to show me the HTML/JSON/PNG files. HTTP may be inefficient fo…

I love IPFS. It's one of my favorite recent technologies, but I think people have unrealistic expectations about such a young idea. Decentralized tech doesn't work well until the network effects build up. IPFS has the interesting quality that the more popular a piece of content is, the easier it is to get ahold of. If millions of people were using IPFS, the most popular content would be being served by many thousands…

> IPFS has the interesting quality that the more popular a piece of content is, the easier it is to get ahold of.

That sounds like the worst of the current internet, but even worse

Re: HTTP is obsolete – it's time for the distributed, permanent web (2015)

#83

Post by yoursunny »

anaphor wrote: post #8

Named-data networking is literally what this is describing, except NDN works as a replacement for TCP, not HTTP. In the long term I'd rather have it work at a lower level and not have to think about it much. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqGEMQveoqg

NDN can work as a replacement for IP too, running directly over Ethernet or other link layer technology.

Re: HTTP is obsolete – it's time for the distributed, permanent web (2015)

#84

Post by supperburg »

Just create an easy way to host stuff. Support a cultural shift toward dithered images and a universal text format. Make hiring a host cheap and easy and make hosting locally easy. Small sizes makes backing up easier and cheaper. Create a service where people can store a shard of the backup of the new internet and in return have their content added to the collective backup. I really think it’s about a cultural shift more than anything. Because without a collective realization that bandwidth and file sizes need to be reigned in, the content on the internet will just live at the perpetually ascending ceiling of what the internet can handle. And in that situation there will never be a way to make the internet a robust, equitable and interesting place.

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

#85

Post by grumbel »

TeeMassive wrote: post #22

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.

Command line client can be found over at:

* https://docs.ipfs.io/install/command-line/#official-distribu...

Single pre-compiled binary, no dependencies. Starting it is just a matter of:

  ipfs daemon
WebUI will show up at:

* http://127.0.0.1:5001/webui

Another useful command on Linux:

  ipfs mount
This make IPFS available as fuse filesystem in the directory /ipfs/, so you can directly access IPFS content without manually downloading it.

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

#87

Post by sodality2 »

kzrdude wrote: post #70
diegocg wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How do you refer to something "by name"? Let's say the current version of Wikipedia's article on Lagrange multiplier - the data is changing, so can't use a hash of the content.

The hash is not a literal hash of the content- I think it's like a key that lets anyone looking for it ensure it's legitimate. Then the IPFS p2p search mechanism is what lets you find it.

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

#88

Post by xur17 »

riobard wrote: post #78
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.

Yeah, I've been pretty disappointed by what they actually shipped. The concept (decentralized, financially incentivized storage) is really neat, and there would be a demand for it, but every time I've tried to use it, it's been incredibly difficult. Ran into similar problems with Sia.

Example: I'd love to use one of these projects as an additional backup layer for my NAS, but the technical complexity necessary to set it all up makes it.. feel very fragile. Definitely not set and forget.

My hope is that in 10 years something cool comes out of one of these projects, but we're definitely not there yet.

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

#89

Post by jeroenhd »

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?

Content is cached for a certain amount of time (default is 24 hours, I think?) before it gets deleted. If the content is requested again, the timer is reset.

This is opposed to long-term caches like Cloudflare's that'll cache the contents of your website regardless of how many requests come in. Cloudflare will happily just refresh the contents of your website even if nobody has been to your website for weeks, and quickly serve it up when it's needed.

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

#90

Post by grumbel »

kzrdude wrote: post #70
diegocg wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How do you refer to something "by name"? Let's say the current version of Wikipedia's article on Lagrange multiplier - the data is changing, so can't use a hash of the content.

With IPFS you access content by hash. So if you have a plain IPFS link to "Lagrange multiplier", it will always point to exactly the same version you are looking at right now. No way to change or update that.

If you want to update content, you have to point the user to a new hash. IPFS has the IPNS mechanism for that, this adds a layer of indirection, so instead of pointing to the IPFS hash directly, you point to the IPNS name which in turn points to the current hash. What an IPNS name is pointing to can be updated by the owner of that IPNS name.

Another option is to do in via plain old DNS and have the DNS record point to the current hash of the website.

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