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HTTP is obsolete – it's time for the distributed, permanent web (2015)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Re: HTTP is obsolete – it's time for the distributed, permanent web (2015)

#241

Post by nl »

dannyobrien wrote: post #196
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…

Note that the Filecoin network (which was designed to be the incentive layer for IPFS storage) has been operational for some time. If you look at the current status at https://file.app/ , you can see that storage costs there are extremely low for large amounts of data. If you can get your data verified as open, public data by applying for datacap with a Filecoin+ notary, it's currently free. See https://plus.fil.org/…

> If you look at the current status at https://file.app/ , you can see that storage costs there are extremely low for large amounts of data.

We were looking at this at work the other day.

We noticed the storage price vs S3 saying "0.03% the cost of Amazon S3" and then someone (who's been trying to get adequate performance out of IPFS for a while) said "0.03% of the price, and even lower performance".

Re: HTTP is obsolete – it's time for the distributed, permanent web (2015)

#242

Post by naasking »

amelius wrote: post #171
noman-land wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. So niche content is difficult to get a hold of? Sounds like a bad idea.

No more difficult than it already was to obtain.

The point being, obtaining the popular stuff is no longer subject to DoS because distributed caching is built into the protocol itself.

Re: HTTP is obsolete – it's time for the distributed, permanent web (2015)

#243

Post by nl »

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…

> I think people have unrealistic expectations about such a young idea.

It launched in Feb 2015.

Things that have launched since then:

The idea of Donald Trump as President of the USA

TikTok

Covid-19

Tesla Model 3

OpenAI

It's entirely possible that everything could change any day now. It's equally plausible that it's just a bad implementation of a decent idea, and something similar could come along and deliver on its promise.

Re: HTTP is obsolete – it's time for the distributed, permanent web (2015)

#244

Post by naasking »

v_london wrote: post #139

Pretty interesting. A lot of people here are focusing on permanence, but for me the main difference on addressing by content vs by host name is the loss of authorship it opens up for the web. Since a research paper of essay is referred to by its hash, the owner effectively gives away all control of the work when it's first published. There will be no editing, no taking down unwanted work, and no real way to build an…

You don't lose authorship, you lose ownership, which arguably you don't have under the regular internet either, ie. Once uploaded, anyone can mirror your content. Arguably under ipfs you literally cannot lose authorship if you put the author in the content because then authorship is part of the content hash used to address/load it.

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

#245

Post by shp0ngle »

shp0ngle wrote: post #238
shp0ngle wrote: post #237

Anyone has any experience with the FileCoin thing? If I want to “save” some data in FileCoin/IPFS/whatever, and I want it there forever, is it cheap? Expensive? Can I be reasonably sure it stays there? I want some actual current results, not “one day in the future”, heard that too much from *Coin proponents

> Estuary is currently in its alpha testing phase. Because of this, there are some restrictions to the service: > The service is temporarily limited to users wanting to store meaningful public data. You can apply for an invite → so… no?

Ah, I can also use my own machine.

> Enough space to store the current Lotus chain (preferably on an SSD storage medium). The chain grows at approximately 38 GiB per day. The chain can be synced from trusted state snapshots and compacted or pruned to a minimum size of around 33Gib. The full history was around 10TiB in June of 2021.

Ugh. OK I will pass then

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

#246

Post by naasking »

acdha wrote: post #156
Sargos wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It gives you the tools to build an archive.org equivalent using volunteer storage though, rather Than asking for monetary donations. All you need is a database of known content hashes and a database of volunteers and you randomly distribute content among volunteers and periodically ensure a minimum number of clients are replicating each known hash.

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

#247

Post by Const-me »

The main performance challenge is hardware not software, it's power management on mobile devices. After a new iPhone will be able to work for a few days on battery, while constantly transmitting data at 10-100 megabits/second, P2P will be good again.

Before iPhone, peer 2 peer tech were doing OK. Then mobile broadband came, and centralized services basically won.

Now we (at least in some places) have mobile broadband of symmetrical 50-100 mbit/sec, yet p2p still doesn't work on mobile. Despite the bandwidth is now good, electricity and thermals still aren't.

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

#249

Post by white-flame »

bawolff wrote: post #216
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…

> This idea hasn’t been new since the turn of the century (BitTorrent offered exactly that in 2001) I feel like freenet (2000) is maybe a better comparison

Yes. I can't stand that IPFS basically took the Freenet model, stripped out all the anonymity & privacy, and added the weird "interplanetary" marketing push.

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

#250

Post by FalconSensei »

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…

> 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.

Except that most people outside tech would probably be using phones/tablets/crappy pcs, with upload speed that is 10% of their download speed.

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