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HTTP is obsolete – it's time for the distributed, permanent web (2015)

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Re: HTTP is obsolete – it's time for the distributed, permanent web (2015)

#151

Post by pfraze »

delaaxe wrote: post #45
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.)

I don't know about IPFS but Arweave solved the "permanent" part by asking nodes to periodically prove that they're actually storing what they're supposed to be storing: https://www.arweave.org/

The IPFS version of Arweave is Filecoin

Re: HTTP is obsolete – it's time for the distributed, permanent web (2015)

#152

Post by acdha »

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."

… if someone else paid to host a copy. Major companies hosting it makes that less likely and if their backing increases usage that also increases the cost of hosting everything, making it more likely that the content you want will be available. When Google shuts down their mirror, suddenly all of that traffic is hitting nodes with far fewer resources.

The underlying problem is that storage and bandwidth cost money and people have been conditioned not to think about paying for what they consume so things end up either being ad supported or overwhelming volunteers.

Re: HTTP is obsolete – it's time for the distributed, permanent web (2015)

#153

Post by jayd16 »

chriswarbo wrote: post #122
somenewaccount1 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And quite annoyingly, it's the opposite of how IPFS works. IPFS nodes only cache the content as long as it's actively requested. Depending on the cache policy of the node, this can be as short as 24 hours. Yes, it could still exist on your private node that your running from your laptop, but this is the equivalent of saying that all published content is available forever because it's on your hard drive . Honestly, I…

> Yes, it could still exist on your private node that your running from your laptop, but this is the equivalent of saying that all published content is available forever because it's on your hard drive. No, the difference is that IPFS will use the same address to fetch content from anyone who's seeding it. If Hacker News shuts down, it will no longer be accessible at 'news.ycombinator.com'; all existing links to that…

Doesn't a forum need things like user login? Is there an example of such a thing as a forum existing fully on IPFS?

Re: HTTP is obsolete – it's time for the distributed, permanent web (2015)

#154

Post by breck »

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…

The Internet in a Box project is an interesting angle:

https://internet-in-a-box.org/

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

#155

Post by jayd16 »

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…

Yeah, I have to agree. We have working examples of immutable copy/append only web apps. Email/mailing lists didn't need crypto to succeed. Neither did bit-torrent. Baking in a coin seems like a me-too sort of move.

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

#156

Post by acdha »

Sargos wrote: post #105
leesalminen wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It does only the first of those things: using content hashes means that anyone can populate an archive which is easily discovered.

For the rest, hosting takes money. People will not archive the entire internet for free and IPFS is not a magic wand which eliminates the need to have people like the skilled IA team. It could make their jobs easier but that’s far from “nearly complete” and no more or less pristine.

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

#157

Post by TeeMassive »

grumbel wrote: post #85
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…

You are missing the point.

Less than 5% of people are what most people would describe as coders and from my experience, I would say less than a third of those are not afraid of using a terminal. Why do you think people still pay for IDEs and fancy git clients with a UI? And of that, only a tiny fraction would have heard of decentralized social media / websites.

If these kind of projects want any global attention then they should be as easy to install as most applications on Android or Apple. Bitcoin began becoming popular when easy to use wallet applications and currency exchange began being mainstream. Same for BitTorrent, Signal and IRC.

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

#158

Post by j_mo »

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.

I think "you host mine, I'll host yours" works better here than a financial incentive.

If you can specify "I've got 1gb spare to replicate other people's assets, as long as each of them replicates mine in return" then your incentive to replicate other people's sites is more redundancy and bandwidth for your own.

If you also prioritise files that have the least replicas across the entire network, and allow servers to re-distribute the content they are replicating, it would surely become quite hard for a file to be lost forever.

This makes more sense to me than having each site pay for their own data to be replicated, because those who don't pay don't get their content replicated, which results in missing content when the server eventually disappears. That is just as bad as HTTP.

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

#160

Post by acdha »

leesalminen wrote: post #38
neilalexander wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that the system requirements are way out of the league of the average home user (32GB RAM, 8 cores, several TB disk space). Plus, if the chain is growing at 38GB/day (as the Filecoin website suggests), that’s a traffic average of 3.8Mbit/s 24 hours a day.

You could always download the IPFS Desktop client and "pin" content that you find valuable to provide to the community, (say, a partial copy of Wikipedia in your language [0]. No crypto-based incentives associated with that though, at least yet. [0] https://github.com/ipfs/distributed-wikipedia-mirror#cohost-...

Wikipedia changes every second. That seems like a very expensive combination for a CAS system — even with good deduplification you’re storing a lot of metadata tracking every revision.
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