Peergos is an interesting human-friendly project built on top of IPFS. Works great so far.
Of interest: they provide a trustless way to store your data encrypted data on centralised boxes (S3, Backblaze) if you want.
HTTP is obsolete – it's time for the distributed, permanent web (2015)
101–110 of 337 posts
Re: HTTP is obsolete – it's time for the distributed, permanent web (2015)
#102IPFS 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…
IPFS's design makes it so that it's all of those things, or none of them. Picking one of them doesn't fit the shape of the technology. IPFS is basically the answer to the question "what is the RIGHT way to decentralize the web?". If you think about that question hard enough, then anyone can see that their way of doing it is the "right" way. It's just obvious. The problem is that all of these mutually supporting components need to be bootstrapped in order to make it work. You can't take the storage of content and federate it out across the entire internet without being able to refer to it by a content id. You can't just have content addressing by itself, because then it's inconvenient to find things on a day-to-day basis. So that means you need a DNS equivalent. And you can't assume a decentralized graph of network participants will bother to serve this information unless there's reward in it for them. So you come to filecoin. Etc.
Point being, they didn't just bite these pieces off randomly: they see a picture of how the internet _could_ work, and they're trying to realize it. If they can get it working, then boom! You have decentralized internet, and you also have a ton of bonuses that just fall out from this being the right way to do things: resistance to censorship, better archiving, reduced influence of web megacorps, etc. But you have to have it -all- to actually be better. The sum is WAY greater than the parts.
The trouble is, this statement:
> Right now it does none of those things well.
is true.
So I get what you're saying. To build user-adoption, they need to find a way to deliver an improved experience, not just an improved model that would be better if more people used it. But I object to the idea that the solution is to choose one of those things at the exclusion of the others. The whole idea doesn't make sense if they choose one. If I were advising them, I wouldn't tell them to reduce their scope in terms of "doing all the things", but rather reduce their scope in terms of doing all the things for the entire internet. They should find some kind of sub-network or community that gets extra value out of the decentralization, and prove out the concept there. Maybe it's a big company's intranet, or a network of (paging ARPA) universities?
Re: HTTP is obsolete – it's time for the distributed, permanent web (2015)
#103The analogy is just plain wrong.
search for content = it presumes that there's a google-like indexing of content, and then a DNS-like way to retrieve it.
It seems to me that IPFS, in this analogy, is simply a different way to address a web page / document.
note: I am very familiar with IPFS. I just think that this analogy is really poor.
Re: HTTP is obsolete – it's time for the distributed, permanent web (2015)
#104The 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.)
IPFS doesn't give you any guarantees about if the content is actually stored anywhere, it however gives you reasonable guarantees that the addresses for that content stay the same. Meaning if somebody finds an old backup tape decades down the road, they can just stuff it back onto IPFS and all the dead links start functioning again. That's something that is impossible with HTTP, as there isn't even a guarantee that t…
One of the spinouts of IPFS is Multiformats, particularly multihashes. It is a standard to describe hashes and provide interop: https://multiformats.io/multihash/ (Or the IPNS dnslink: http://multiformats.io.ipns.localhost:8080/multihash/ )
Re: HTTP is obsolete – it's time for the distributed, permanent web (2015)
#105The 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.)
I wonder if it could make running a service like archive.org easier. Or if it could allow for a distributed archive.org service where nerds worldwide can contribute x GB storage to the cause?
This is one of the biggest stated use cases of IPFS as it effectively replaces archive.org with a better version that is more distributed, has better uptime, and more importantly has a much larger and nearly complete and pristine version of the entire internet for conceivably as long as the internet itself exists.
Re: HTTP is obsolete – it's time for the distributed, permanent web (2015)
#106IPFS 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…
IPFS's design makes it so that it's all of those things, or none of them. Picking one of them doesn't fit the shape of the technology. IPFS is basically the answer to the question "what is the RIGHT way to decentralize the web?". If you think about that question hard enough, then anyone can see that their way of doing it is the "right" way. It's just obvious. The problem is that all of these mutually supporting compo…
[deleted]
Re: HTTP is obsolete – it's time for the distributed, permanent web (2015)
#107Earlier 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…
Mosaic supported form fields, before Netscape even started. Eg, https://www.w3.org/People/Raggett/book4/ch02.html .
As I recall, one of the example CGI programs from NCSA presented a form to fill out a Papa John's order, which was then sent via the email-to-fax gateway. Which, now that I think of it, was indeed more "economic".
Cookies was definitely a Netscape thing, for profit making - a shopping cart for MCI.
Re: HTTP is obsolete – it's time for the distributed, permanent web (2015)
#108I'll just point to the millions of torrent files today that will remain unseeded forever. Durability with P2P only works as a complement to centralization.
I think streaming is killing torrents and the fact that you need a VPN in many countries to avoid getting fined
Re: HTTP is obsolete – it's time for the distributed, permanent web (2015)
#109The 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.)
The claims are too strong, but it is strictly more available than today: if the original host stays it is guaranteed to stay, same as today. If they disappear, it may stay, which is stronger than today (ignoring internet archive).
Re: HTTP is obsolete – it's time for the distributed, permanent web (2015)
#110Named-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 is the way
p2p no huge IP infrastructure between nodes
interest packets at narrow waist (like human attention, scarce)
sign all packets, more secure, easier to trust|not
hash for pointers, no surprises in containers
crypto apply more cryptography, less web3 baloney
broadcast radio native, no emulation of copper wire
data, closer to where you want, find faster, keep
content you want w/out intermediation, need to find "where" within IP/udp/tcp addresses
https://youtu.be/P-GN-pYfRoo?t=1825 node to node
https://youtu.be/yLGzGK4c-ws?t=4817 more application, less security hassle
http://youtu.be/uvnP-_R-RYA?t=3018 hash name the data
https://youtu.be/gqGEMQveoqg&t=3006 data integrity w/out need to trust foreign server