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HTTP is obsolete – it's time for the distributed, permanent web (2015)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Re: HTTP is obsolete – it's time for the distributed, permanent web (2015)

#112
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It won't, but much of the web could work well on JAMStack, and there's no reason that couldn't be supported.

JAMStack != static site served entirely by a CDN. There’s an A for API in there. Where’s the A for IPFS? There’s no such thing.

It can be built, but I don't think there are any frameworks that make it easy. A JSON file can be an API, but authentication and encryption using static publicly available files is more challenging, especially for a large number of users. That is where blockchain solutions come into place.

Re: HTTP is obsolete – it's time for the distributed, permanent web (2015)

#113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My IPFS pin was just one or two of my servers running an IPFS daemon. Since that daemon was running on Oracle's free VPS's, the answer is probably "a small fraction of what it costs for Oracle to have you in their database". Paying for pinning sounds like something that could work but it would introduce some of the same problems that the real web suffers from back into IPFS. The idea "a web for the people, by the peo…

if it was slow running on a dedicated vps, not super encouraging. The thing I liked about the idea of IPFS pinning is that you are paying per byte stored, v.s. per byte accessed, as long as the p2p sharing works. I.e. hosting-via-pinning a website only you read would cost the same as hosting a website that the whole internet reads.

To be fair to the software itself, the system was never pegged for CPU usage or anything, and it wasn't a fast VPS to begin with.

From what I could tell the performance issue was mostly located in the networking itself, getting the client to resolve the content on the right server. That's something that could be improved through all kinds of algorithms without breaking compatibility or functionality, so there's hope.

I agree that pinning comes with some interesting ways to monetize hosting without the need for targeted advertising that the web seems to have these days. Small projects like blogs, webcomics and animations could be entirely hosted and supported by the communities around a work, while right now giant data brokers need to step in and host everything for "free".

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

#114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a reason private trackers have to incentivize keeping the long tail alive.

Look at any public tracker and you'll find torrents that are very old, swarming strong.

Along with those that have 0 seeders.

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

#115
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…

Sounds like it's working fine for you. "Several seconds" of lag is nothing for an "Inter-Planetary File System", in fact it's on par with other decentralised P2P networks.

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

#117
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…

> If millions of people were using IPFS...

...then IPFS would just get even slower and use even more resources to manage the index and find content as I am pretty sure the DHT they are using doesn't scale the way you seem to think it does.

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

#118
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/ )

Seems like this pointlessly duplicates the "Naming things with hashes" ni: and nih: URI schemes, standardised as https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6920 . (IPFS actually uses a proprietary "package" representation as parent points out, so there's little harm in it not using ni: URI's. But standard hashes of the underlying resource should use those. "Magnet" links are similarly problematic, but these at least support a few convenience features.)

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

#119
post #108
post #47

I'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

I agree with this, I haven't torrented anything in a very long time as most of things I want are streamable somewhere (and I don't care about file ownership), or set up for direct download on some forum somewhere.
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