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IPFS Maintainers Winding Down

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Re: IPFS Maintainers Winding Down

#111

Post by arjie »

JuniperMesos wrote: post #48

> 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…

I wonder what distinguishes these kinds of communities over others. Some, like 'decentralization' or 'privacy' or 'security', require absolute adherence. If you're building a decentralized tool or a privacy tool or a security tool you must first reinvent the universe. Post on HN? Centralized, privacy nightmare, insecure. Use Gmail as your email provider? Centralized, privacy nightmare, insecure. Fastmail? Centralized. Run your own mail provider? Cool, on a cloud? Centralized, privacy nightmare. On your own infra? Centralized, bus factor 1.

Sort of an interesting market signal. "Don't bother building for me unless you're absolutely pure". Funny stuff.

Re: IPFS Maintainers Winding Down

#113

Post by sunshine-o »

The question is why IPFS did not get the traction something like Tor had for decades?

I believe the fundamental problem of those protocols is everyone fear ending up serving child porn just by running a "node" and taking a chance at explaining the future P2P internet to a judge.

IPFS got a CID deny list [0] but it was too little too late

- [0] https://badbits.dwebops.pub/

Re: IPFS Maintainers Winding Down

#114

Post by QuantumNomad_ »

scirob wrote: post #65

I tried to build a few non crypto decentralized apps. The killer was reliable always deliverability inside the browser. https://inbrowser.link/ was a huge jump in utility but came to late the ipfs.js just never worked consistently. In the end the only way to get good XP for yours users was that you provider the IPFS to http gateway for all content but then whats the point its just decentralization theater. I remember…

> In the end the only way to get good XP for yours users was that you provider the IPFS to http gateway for all content but then whats the point its just decentralization theater.

I gave my static photo album website image files paths that consisted of /ipfs/ as directory name and ipfs hash as file name.

Brave browser was able to figure out that this meant they were available on IPFS, and asked me if i wanted to load the files from IPFS instead of from the web server itself.

So over time if hosting files on IPFS got popular, it could have been used automatically by browsers later to load the files from IPFS instead of the web server of the site. Saving bandwidth for the website operators and distributing storage of content which might also help it remain available for longer time.

That sort of thing would have been one great outcome, for example, where this sort of hosting your own http gateway for your own IPFS files makes sense like I was doing. Mind you, the web server setup for this was completely straightforward and requires no running of the IPFS services on the web server itself. On the web server it really was plain old directories and file names. As long as they are real IPFS hashes. And calculating the IPFS hash itself I did on my laptop when adding photos.

Very sad to hear in this thread that Brave browser has actually removed IPFS support :(

Re: IPFS Maintainers Winding Down

#115

Post by 2color »

jadbox wrote: post #49
devttyeu wrote: 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…

who uses Iroh?

We're using in Radicle for artifact distribution: https://radicle.network/nodes/iris.radicle.network/rad%3Az4V...

And also working to replace the Radicle's networking stack with Iroh: https://radicle.zulipchat.com/#narrow/channel/369274-General...

Re: IPFS Maintainers Winding Down

#116

Post by 2color »

tonyhb wrote: post #69
devttyeu wrote: 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.

We built an IPFS-like system for distributing files in the radicle ecosystem with Iroh and iroh-blobs: https://radicle.network/nodes/iris.radicle.network/rad%3Az4V...

The way I would put is as: Iroh + iroh-blobs == libp2p + UnixFS + Bitswap, and the latter three are some of the critical components that have defined most IPFS implementations.

Re: IPFS Maintainers Winding Down

#117

Post by 2color »

CommanderData wrote: post #13
devttyeu wrote: 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…

I love Iroh but it doesn't quite work the same as IPFS if I understand correctly.

The way I would put is as: Iroh + iroh-blobs == libp2p + UnixFS + Bitswap, and the latter three are some of the critical components that have defined most IPFS implementations.

Re: IPFS Maintainers Winding Down

#119

Post by momack2 »

The post here is pretty confusing (so no blame to anyone who reads this as "IPFS the project" shutting down instead of just a single maintainer team, it's totally misleading) - but this is actually just a sunset announcement for _Shipyard_ - one of many IPFS implementation maintainers.

*The IPFS Project is not sunsetting or shutting down* - just switching to individual maintainer grants instead of centralized implementation support within Shipyard.

Re: IPFS Maintainers Winding Down

#120

Post by thataccount »

JuniperMesos wrote: post #81
thataccount wrote: post #62

What makes/made IPFS special was how it could be seen with relative ease on the standard internet. That feature allowed it to bypass censorship. I cannot say I am surprised that the funding was not re-upped since it seems like the modern web really loves censoring the crap out of things. Edited: I also liked how it bypassed the traditional domain system.

These are good qualities in general; but it's worth asking why this anti-censorship technology required funding from one organization (Protocol Labs) that could cut off that funding and now has done so. Being economically non-viable without grants is one way that anti-censorship technology is ineffective at its stated goal.

My guess is they banked on Web 3 and now want to pivot to AI instead of vast storage of data.
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