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HTTP is obsolete – it's time for the distributed, permanent web (2015)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Re: HTTP is obsolete – it's time for the distributed, permanent web (2015)

#291

Post by krageon »

Taek wrote: post #235
sam345 wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any good links to Skynet? I could just find an old GitHub repo. Is it in active use ?

Check out the pinned repos: https://github.com/SkynetLabs Also https://docs.siasky.net/ Very much an actively developed project, with over 100,000 monthly active users.

The second link claims that it will store data without payment and allow extracting money in the future, with 0 mention of who is paying for the space. This is so suspicious that I almost cannot believe this is not addressed immediately.

Re: HTTP is obsolete – it's time for the distributed, permanent web (2015)

#292

Post by captainbland »

I did like the concept of IPFS around the time this was written but now it feels to me like it misses the wood for the trees.

The thing is that the web by its nature is already decentralised. The real issue with the web today isn't really some technical, architectural flaw.

Centralisation has emerged in this already reasonably well decentralised system because of network effect driven accumulation, the market and pre-existing wealth from investors tipping the scales.

Yes IPFS is a more thorough attempt to create a distributed web, yet I doubt it is fully immune to the forces that captured and centralised the existing web, except for the fact that it is currently unpopular. Or it will remain unpopular because there's no incentive for private enterprises to invest much in a system where they can't control their own corner of it and few users like using systems built on the cheap when flashy, well funded alternatives exist, if it is truly that resilient to centralisation. Whichever way you want to slice it.

The social forces that cause centralisation in the web are the same forces that cause e.g. monopoly and extreme wealth accrual in the rest of society. And the fix has to be social, not technical.

Re: HTTP is obsolete – it's time for the distributed, permanent web (2015)

#293

Post by hannasanarion »

grumbel wrote: post #68
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.)

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…

That still requires you to deliberately decide to archive a certain page, which you can do just as easily with http. The SingleFile browser extension will grab everything that's linked to a page and build a locally stored directory with all the dependencies of that page.

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

#294

Post by Taek »

amelius wrote: post #287
Taek wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Skynet I don't know Skynet. I first checked Google, got a Wikipedia link describing a movie, then checked the Wikipedia disambiguation page, but got nothing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skynet Also, why would a project duplicate the efforts of IPFS rather than contribute to it?

https://siasky.net/ and https://docs.siasky.net/

IPFS has chosen an architecture which fundamentally keeps it non-performant, Skynet is built from the ground up in a different way, and gets 10-100x improvements on performance for content-addressed links, and 100-1000x improvements on performance for dynamic lookups (IPNS)

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

#295

Post by meltedcapacitor »

davidgerard wrote: post #165
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.)

It absolutely guarantees nothing of the sort. A big problem in the NFT space of late is that OpenSea sells NFTs that link to an IPFS URL, then doesn't bother seeding the image after it's sold - so a pile of NFT images no longer exist anywhere on the IPFS. https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkdj79/peoples-expensive-nft...

Isn't that a feature? Some NFTs are hashes of recordings of destroying some physical piece of art. Surely the next level is for NFT of jpegs where only the hash is left! It will be the next big thing to go to the moon! The uncertainty about someone finding a forgotten copy adds incredible depth to the sport.

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

#296

Post by chriswarbo »

jayd16 wrote: post #153
chriswarbo wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

> Doesn't a forum need things like user login?

I was only talking about the HTML, not the backend server code. Still, you could look on https://awesome.ipfs.io/apps for ideas.

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

#298

Post by naasking »

acdha wrote: post #285
naasking wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

“All you need” is only true at the highest level: IPFS gives you a great way to discover replicated content. It doesn't help you know that the list of known hashes is complete (consider how much work IA has spent making sure that they crawl sites completely enough to be able to replay complex JavaScript), handle the scale of that list (this is a VERY large database which updates constantly), or provide networked stor…

> It doesn't help you know that the list of known hashes is complete

Right, which is why I said it would have to periodically scan the registered clients to ensure a minimum number of clients has each block to ensure redundancy.

> also the bandwidth available to serve that content on a timely manner and rebuild a missing replica before another fails.

I think a slow, cheap but reliable archive is better than "more expensive but lower latency", so I'm not particularly concerned with timeliness.

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

#299

Post by chriswarbo »

Linosaurus wrote: post #262
chriswarbo wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> On the other hand, an IPFS version will continue to exist at the same address for as long as anyone is seeding it. I wonder how that would work, a naive direct translation seems impractical. An address identifies an exact piece of content, so a hacker news article gets a new adress every time a comment is added?

If the HTML differs, it would get a different address; just like the Wayback Machine, but the addresses are based on content rather than timestamp, and it's distributed. Anyone can do that right now, without any changes by (or permission from) the site operator (YCombinator in this case).

You couldn't host the "live" version of Hacker News (with user accounts, new comments, etc.) unless YCombinator open up their databases, and re-architect the system to work in a distributed-friendly way.

The latter is an interesting idea, but isn't required to fix HTTP issues like link rot.

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

#300

Post by TheOtherWW »

xur17 wrote: post #88
riobard wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was supposed to be solved by FileCoin, i.e. financial incentives to keep content alive.

Yeah, I've been pretty disappointed by what they actually shipped. The concept (decentralized, financially incentivized storage) is really neat, and there would be a demand for it, but every time I've tried to use it, it's been incredibly difficult. Ran into similar problems with Sia. Example: I'd love to use one of these projects as an additional backup layer for my NAS, but the technical complexity necessary to set…

Filebase offers an abstraction layer to Sia, Storj and other decentralized networks. It's S3 compatible as well, so it plugs right into most NAS setups including Synology Hyper Backup and QNAP.

[1] https://filebase.com

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