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HTTP is obsolete – it's time for the distributed, permanent web (2015)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Re: HTTP is obsolete – it's time for the distributed, permanent web (2015)

#181

Post by wpietri »

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…

Exactly. To get the beginnings of real adoption, a technology has to do something better. A specific thing. Better enough that people switch.

The early web's competition was things like FTP, Gopher, and email-driven apps (e.g., Listservs, the Usenet Oracle). Plus paper-based stuff, like department phone books, mailing documents around, etc. It was hugely better than any of those for many common uses, so adoption was rapid.

Once you have a critical mass of users, then it can make sense to add other things in. But for that first audience, we can't be vague, selling some shining future that will happen eventually.

Re: HTTP is obsolete – it's time for the distributed, permanent web (2015)

#182

Post by hannasanarion »

noman-land wrote: post #161
acdha wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> think people have unrealistic expectations about such a young idea. This interesting given your description: > 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 of people, and finding it and downloading it would be extremely fast. This idea hasn’t been…

IPFS is basically BitTorrent if all the torrents could share with each other. IPFS is as if each "torrent" is a single chunk of data instead of a siloed collection of stuff. IPFS expands BitTorrent into a global filesystem. You can mount IPFS on your filesystem and address files by pointing at local resources on your machine. So you could have an HTML file say ` `. You can't do that with BitTorrent.

Okay, but it's not 2001 anymore. Bittorrent was useful because parallelizing uploads across a broad network increased speed to a degree that content hosts couldn't manage.

But that's not true anymore, most internet power-users are on broadband connections, many of which are symmetric, transfer speeds up or down are no longer a limiter that pushes people towards decentralization.

So when considering a decentralized system like IPFS, the downsides of decentralization, like availability, edit control, and service support, are much more salient.

There are a lot of things that "could work if everybody uses it". You can never get there if the thing isn't desirable compared to existing alternatives.

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

#183

Post by stjohnswarts »

neiman wrote: post #179

The "permanent web" goal didn't survive that well. I work closely with IPFS since 2018, and it's not part of the narative by now. The distributed part is still going strong, but in my eyes distributed (or decentralization) should be a tool, not a goal. The question is which kind of Internet we want to build with these distributed infrastructure? If it's just cloning the current Internet, then I don't see what it brin…

So the minority of users see/talk about/hear what the majority wants? So they are forced just fork it and form their own distributed network independent and isolated from the internet at large?

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

#184

Post by Datsundere »

This has been bothering for the longest time. I would love to learn more about efforts that are being taken to avoid these workarounds we have for certs expiring, dns issues and such.

A lot of website hacking could've been avoided with a better design like even having encryption as standard.

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

#185

Post by lovemenot »

muxator wrote: post #149
echelon wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Imagine if we said that about web sites at the begining. The web was fast (for documents on 56k) and extremely useful almost immediately. It was obvious to everyone watching that the technology was going to change everything.

I do not understand the downvotes here. "It was obvious to everyone watching that the technology was going to change everything": how to disagree?

I wasn't a down-voter, but I didn't have 56k in 1994.

14.4 baud iirc. You wouldn't call it fast.

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

#186

Post by Taek »

thomashop wrote: post #178
sebastos wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I would have preferred IPFS to do the storage and propagation of data really well and not implemented stuff like IPNS in the core. To me this should be a separate codebase. And I see this in other features they have been including too. I'm using IPFS quite heavily to store content generated on https://pollinations.ai but there is no way I could run it without a centralized node that I have control over at the moment…

Have you had a chance to try Skynet? It provides all of the same features as IPFS, but it's also a lot more performant and higher uptime. You wouldn't need a centralized node that you run yourself.

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

#187

Post by Taek »

zozbot234 wrote: post #115
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…

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.

Skynet fetches files in under 100ms, you can definitely get a decentralized system going as fast as the centralized web if you build it right.

The main challenge for me with this comment is that you can't expect distributed/decentralized networks to win if you set an expectation that "things will just be slower than the normal web". Nobody is going to migrate to that.

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

#189

Post by Taek »

guntars wrote: post #143
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…

Try browsing the IPFS example "website". I opens for me under a few hundred milliseconds. ipfs cat /ipfs/QmQPeNsJPyVWPFDVHb77w8G42Fvo15z4bG2X8D2GhfbSXc/readme

The IPFS network tends to run quickly if the file you are fetching is stored in the cache of either ipfs.io or in the cache of cloudflare. Everything else has lookup times of 30-60 seconds, sometimes more.

DHTs just aren't a good choice for massive data systems if you need low latency.

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

#190

Post by forgotmypw17 »

j_mo wrote: post #158
xwdv wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

How would this stand up to an attack of uploading random data in large quantities?

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