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IPFS Maintainers Winding Down

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Re: IPFS Maintainers Winding Down

#161

Post by jubilanti »

iand wrote: post #149
jubilanti wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

@dang yes, and title is editorialized, the real one is "The end of IPFS at Shipyard" which is more informative It's still a a real loss, those are widely used products, but the signal that Protocol Labs is sending about IPFS in defunding this might be even worse for the ecosystem. Cloudflare, Brave, and now Protocol Labs have abandoned it.

Except no-one knows what shipyard is and it could more easily be mistaken for the end of IPFS. Maintainers of IPFS are winding down is much more informative for those not in the space.

In the future, if you want to editorialize a title, do so after the official title:

The end of IPFS at Shipyard: (Many) IPFS Maintainers Winding Down

Re: IPFS Maintainers Winding Down

#162

Post by chriswarbo »

bitwize wrote: post #138
virgil_disgr4ce wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

please define "authentic activity" and "inauthentic activity"

Legitimate. Legal. IPFS, Freenet, and experiments like that mainly serve as a place for people to store and distribute pirated copyrighted material, child porn, hit lists, terrorism manifestos and plans, and the like. Scratch a libertarian and, nine times out of ten, you'll find someone who advocates for no or minimal government because they want to do something the government legitimately bars them from doing. Scrat…

> IPFS, Freenet, and experiments like that

> a libertarian decentralized P2P E2EE communication project

Your argument makes sense for Freenet (though I'd personally defend that project too); but not so much for IPFS.

Firstly, IPFS doesn't have any encryption (E2E or otherwise).

Also, Freenet spreads data around the network (for robustness and plausible-deniability), so the peers providing a file are not the peers which inserted it. IPFS does no such thing: if you want your content to remain available, you'd better be running an IPFS node that provides it.

Either way, it feels like a pretty bad idea to host dodgy stuff on IPFS.

IPFS is much closer to HTTP. The difference is that content is immutable, and can be re-hosted by anyone that happens to have a copy (e.g. no need for mirrors, etc.).

(Note that HTTP was invented to disseminate physics research; not CSAM)

Re: IPFS Maintainers Winding Down

#163

Post by nvme0n1p1 »

What is Shipyard anyway? I see from their site:

> We are the core maintainers of IPFS, libp2p, and other foundational open-source web3 primitives.

So they just stopped funding every project mentioned on their site? What's left?

Re: IPFS Maintainers Winding Down

#164

Post by chriswarbo »

noman-land wrote: post #39
chriswarbo wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that IPNS has always seemed a bit naff; but alternatives naming systems can be used too (if your system's name resolver can understand them); e.g. this uses pkarr addresses for IPFS content: http://www.chriswarbo.net/blog/2026-05-08-pkdnslink.html Regarding an "update path", GNS has support for that built-in; though I've not been able to try it myself, since I can't get GNUNet to bootstrap :-(

I always thought that they should have used ENS instead of whatever coin they ended up making. GNS is cool but IIRC (years ago) it had no incentive mechanism which is I think where a lot of these solutions fall down. Even imaginary "ratio points" that p2p file sharing sites have being using for years work better than "donate your resources out of the goodness of your heart".

My personal opinion is that any notion of "incentive mechanisms" for IPFS is bullshit: whether Filecoin, or otherwise.

There is already a perfectly good incentive mechanism: if someone wants to host some data, they can; and if nobody wants to host it, it doesn't get hosted.

That's worked perfectly well for HTTP, without any shitcoin needed. The advantage of IPFS is that its URLs resolve to anybody who cares enough to host that data; so links will only 404 when nobody cares (unlike HTTP, which relies on a single point of failure).

Re: IPFS Maintainers Winding Down

#165

Post by chriswarbo »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #147
QuantumNomad_ wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I wonder if (in theory) it wouldn't make more sense to address this sort of thing at the system resolver level rather than in the browser, the way tor does.

Deeper OS integration would be nice, but harder to roll out. I think the plan early on was to make something useful/generic/agnostic enough that a couple of big browsers would add support, then it could try becoming a Web standard.

Unfortunately that hasn't panned out; but it still feels more feasible than getting Microsoft and Apple to add it to their OS network stacks.

Re: IPFS Maintainers Winding Down

#166

Post by cwillu »

jubilanti wrote: post #141
momack2 wrote: post #119

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 impleme…

@dang yes, and title is editorialized, the real one is "The end of IPFS at Shipyard" which is more informative It's still a a real loss, those are widely used products, but the signal that Protocol Labs is sending about IPFS in defunding this might be even worse for the ecosystem. Cloudflare, Brave, and now Protocol Labs have abandoned it.

“@dang“ doesn't do anything, email the address at the bottom of the page if you're wanting to propose an administrative or editorial action.

Re: IPFS Maintainers Winding Down

#167

Post by stackghost »

chriswarbo wrote: post #22
stackghost wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Content-addressable storage as a whole is a non-starter with non-technical users.

I don't understand. Billions of non-technical users are loading URLs like ` https://cdn.foo/?guid=deadbeefdeadbeefdeadbeef ` all the time. Why would they care if those URLs became `ipfs://deadbeefdeadbeefdeadbeef` instead?

The number of normies visiting urls directly from a CDN is a rounding error.

Non technical users like pronounceable domain names. It's why we aren't just using IP addresses.

CAS is intimidating to non-technical types.

Re: IPFS Maintainers Winding Down

#168

Post by chriswarbo »

Grombobulous wrote: post #92
muragekibicho wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the crypto aspect that's silly. Tech is cool IMO. However, the crypto adjacency makes it all look scammy tbh.

In addition to that, this noble goal of being an insurance policy against censorship never played out. How hard would it be for a country to block the clients and browser extensions you need to use it in the first place? Or to develop a firewall technology that’s capable of blocking the traffic? Probably not that hard, especially since nobody uses IPFS for anything business critical since it’s not all that great at d…

> The only reason it’s decentralized is because blockchain and crypto was hype 10 years ago.

IPFS is not "blockchain" or "crypto"(currency).

It's much closer to git-over-bittorrent. Note that both of those things were decentralised long before "blockchain" and "crypto" existed.

The makers of IPFS also made a crypto thing called Filecoin; but that's a different project. Avoiding IPFS because of crypto is like avoiding the Web because of social media.

Re: IPFS Maintainers Winding Down

#169

Post by jdiff »

uproarchat wrote: post #75
timcobb wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The NFT is the metadata. The metadata is the token that cannot be funged.

The image is a wholly separate thing that a token points at, and multiple tokens can point at the same thing just fine. NFTs be be funge-free but images are fully fungible.

Re: IPFS Maintainers Winding Down

#170

Post by chriswarbo »

stackghost wrote: post #167
chriswarbo wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand. Billions of non-technical users are loading URLs like ` https://cdn.foo/?guid=deadbeefdeadbeefdeadbeef ` all the time. Why would they care if those URLs became `ipfs://deadbeefdeadbeefdeadbeef` instead?

The number of normies visiting urls directly from a CDN is a rounding error. Non technical users like pronounceable domain names. It's why we aren't just using IP addresses. CAS is intimidating to non-technical types.

Pronounceable names can point to a content address, the same way they can point to an IP address. For example, https://dnslink.dev points a DNS name to a content address; git refs point to git objects; etc.
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