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IPFS Maintainers Winding Down

ipshipyard.com

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Re: IPFS Maintainers Winding Down

#71
post #69
post #4

Sad to see it go having been a maintainer some years ago. For anyone wondering, there are more sustainable (with a viable, focused business backing the project) options to do p2p, namely Iroh - https://www.iroh.computer/ which was built by ex-IPFS ex-Protocol Labs devs (I have no relation to the team beyond having worked with them back in the day). Sadly Protocol Labs is doing.. ehh whatever now, except apparently su…

Iroh seems more comparable to an L7 scoped Tailscale than it does IPFS. It's good, but pretty unrelated.

Iroh got started with IPFS-style content-addressed blob transfers as the primary way to use it, still has that functionality but its now a bit of a second tier citizen. See https://docs.iroh.computer/protocols/blobs

Besides just p2p streams seem to be much more useful, those are plug-and-play into most software, e.g. I wrote https://github.com/magik6k/git-remote-iroh that just plugs the git remote proto into iroh and lets you move repo commits between computers by just copying a string from one place to another on push. Doing that with blobs - not gonna happen, not that easily.

Re: IPFS Maintainers Winding Down

#73

Does IPFS actually have users? I remeber when they raised 270 million and a bunch of people there got wildly wealthy

I guess IPFS is an artifact from the crypto craze. It's pretty silly if you think of it. However, I must admit, I got my first ever developer grant from Filecoin while they were flush with ZIRP era money.

btw,I thought it was an Initial Coin Offering, not an actual fundraise.

Re: IPFS Maintainers Winding Down

#74
I tried to query a lot of resources (NFT images, many of which are/were hosted on IPFS) from IPFS myself using the official Go server, running on some pretty fast/wide hardware, for a good part of 2021 and 2022. It was a dumpster fire. Here are two specific problems that I remember, though I ran into several more. First, the UDP storm that it created somehow broke my network, where all of my switches gave up and just started sending all of its traffic to all of the nodes on the network. That could have been a "me" thing but it really made it hard to trust. I ended up having to give that server its own VLAN. Second, the caching was brain dead. By default, it would write every resource to the cache even if I was just using it to download them to a local directory, so it wrote everything twice. Even worse, when the cache was full, it would just drop the whole cache, which created huge spikes in IO util. I ended up patching the app to remove caching.

It felt like a really cool demo that never got cleaned up to work as a real production product.

Re: IPFS Maintainers Winding Down

#75
post #66
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The checksum of the asset is on the blockchain. the asset is somewhere else.

Hmm I thought the asset is the block chain entry because that's what you have the key to, that you can re-sell to someone else. It's like crypto, no?

The asset is more akin to a deed or a claim. Most NFTs are images hosted on S3 or IPFS. The blockchain entry is metadata with a pointer to the hosted asset.

Re: IPFS Maintainers Winding Down

#76
post #4

Sad to see it go having been a maintainer some years ago. For anyone wondering, there are more sustainable (with a viable, focused business backing the project) options to do p2p, namely Iroh - https://www.iroh.computer/ which was built by ex-IPFS ex-Protocol Labs devs (I have no relation to the team beyond having worked with them back in the day). Sadly Protocol Labs is doing.. ehh whatever now, except apparently su…

[deleted]

Re: IPFS Maintainers Winding Down

#77

Does IPFS actually have users? I remeber when they raised 270 million and a bunch of people there got wildly wealthy

I guess IPFS is an artifact from the crypto craze. It's pretty silly if you think of it. However, I must admit, I got my first ever developer grant from Filecoin while they were flush with ZIRP era money. btw,I thought it was an Initial Coin Offering, not an actual fundraise.

What's silly about it? Content-addressable decentralized storage -- not tied to a cryptocurrency -- is really valuable for censorship-resistant archiving of politically-sensitive data (such as climate change research).

Re: IPFS Maintainers Winding Down

#78

> If you have a favourite memory of working with Shipyard, or an idea you always hoped IPFS would eventually achieve, we’d love to hear it. Google Form One important thing I'd like to see IPFS or a similar decentralized web technology achieve, is getting rid of the necessity of filling out a Google form in order to tell the Shipyard people what I think about their maintenance of IPFS. Seriously it bugs me when people…

Dude they just got shut down and will need to look for new jobs, cut them a tiny bit of slack.

It's a problem for the entire ecosystem that the most expedient thing to do, the thing that we should have sympathy for them picking under a time of stress, is the thing that relies on people who want to communicate with them having a Google account and having that communication intermediated through Google with no alternative. And since the entire point of Shipyard as an organization is to be stewards of the decentralized web software ecosystem, the fact that they're not using decentralized web tech is relevant to their mission and values.

Re: IPFS Maintainers Winding Down

#79
post #4

Sad to see it go having been a maintainer some years ago. For anyone wondering, there are more sustainable (with a viable, focused business backing the project) options to do p2p, namely Iroh - https://www.iroh.computer/ which was built by ex-IPFS ex-Protocol Labs devs (I have no relation to the team beyond having worked with them back in the day). Sadly Protocol Labs is doing.. ehh whatever now, except apparently su…

there are a lot of completely free file sharing services for authentic activity (e.g. github, google drive)

inauthentic activity seems to move from one product space to another. in 3 years we'll be hearing about stripe shutting down openrouter for example.

Re: IPFS Maintainers Winding Down

#80
post #74

I tried to query a lot of resources (NFT images, many of which are/were hosted on IPFS) from IPFS myself using the official Go server, running on some pretty fast/wide hardware, for a good part of 2021 and 2022. It was a dumpster fire. Here are two specific problems that I remember, though I ran into several more. First, the UDP storm that it created somehow broke my network, where all of my switches gave up and just…

Ouch.

Remember Filecoin? The original concept was that you could buy perpetual storage with a one time payment. It was funded by a crypto asset which was a derivative of mass storage prices, or something like that. Lighthouse supposedly sold such a product.[1] They no longer do.[2]

[1] https://www.lighthouse.storage/blogs/Permanent%20Storage%20P...

[2] https://www.lighthouse.storage/pricing

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