IPFS Maintainers Winding Down • Hacker News Board

Re: IPFS Maintainers Winding Down

#211

Post by fc417fc802 » Tue, Aug 25, 2026, 6:17 PM UTC

ktm5j wrote: post #203

fc417fc802 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's a perfectly valid complaint about the ecosystem at large. Not a criticism of the individuals or of this specific case to be clear, but a broader observation that this isn't how things ought to be according to a certain set of ideals and the question then of why we keep seeing it over and over. Clearly there's some sort of systemic shortcoming that applies to the entire ecosystem.

What exactly is the complaint? They haven't even made that clear is my point.

They were perfectly clear; you're trolling.

Re: IPFS Maintainers Winding Down

#212

Post by inigyou » Tue, Aug 25, 2026, 6:24 PM UTC

tancop wrote: post #200

inigyou wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They did - Bittorrent

Optimized for throughput and large files. It's slow to start, downloads chunks in random order and there is no standard way to link torrents together. It's a bad fit for anything that's supposed to replace the traditional web.

Bittorrent isn't slow to start.

Re: IPFS Maintainers Winding Down

#213

Post by inigyou » Tue, Aug 25, 2026, 6:33 PM UTC

fc417fc802 wrote: post #210

inigyou wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But bittorrent has been successfully censored. People are afraid to run it because they know their ISP will forward them demand letters.

That's not what we were talking about here. But as long as we're on this tangent I hardly think using a VPN constitutes a high bar to clear. There are still plenty of jurisdictions remaining in the world that in practice don't care to enforce copyright law against individuals (or sometimes at all).

Most western governments are currently in the process of making anonymous VPNs illegal.

Re: IPFS Maintainers Winding Down

#214

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Aug 25, 2026, 11:08 PM UTC

hannahhoward wrote: post #209

Official announcement from the main project: https://blog.ipfs.tech/2026-08-beyond-sponsored-gateways/

[deleted]

Re: IPFS Maintainers Winding Down

#215

Post by belviewreview » Tue, Aug 25, 2026, 11:31 PM UTC

Question from a non-techy: if today someone who is a non-techy wants to store some files on ipfs, how hard is it? A few clicks, or a day reading documents and installing software, with various ways of unintentionally fouling it up, or what?

Re: IPFS Maintainers Winding Down

#216

Post by frollogaston » Wed, Aug 26, 2026, 12:33 AM UTC

inigyou wrote: post #197

Ekaros wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even more so when in most cases no one could explain any real type of ownership in terms of working in most existing legal frameworks. What would I have owned exactly? What would have ownership entitled... All very reasonable question. Mostly entirely ignored or handwaved...

In the case of the bay area yacht club you would have owned the right to be a member of the yacht club

So they have a cool club for yachting but ruin it with geeky digital tokens

Re: IPFS Maintainers Winding Down

#217

Post by frollogaston » Wed, Aug 26, 2026, 12:34 AM UTC

inigyou wrote: post #212

tancop wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Optimized for throughput and large files. It's slow to start, downloads chunks in random order and there is no standard way to link torrents together. It's a bad fit for anything that's supposed to replace the traditional web.

Bittorrent isn't slow to start.

It takes at least 5 seconds, which is slow for this use case

Re: IPFS Maintainers Winding Down

#218

Post by stackghost » Wed, Aug 26, 2026, 2:10 AM UTC

chriswarbo wrote: post #188

stackghost wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is irrelevant. The point I'm responding to is this: >I think something like IPFS is definitely needed. There is nothing stopping you from distributing a webapp on bittorrent but you'll also need to add a README for instructions on how to run the webapp on localhost so a browser can render it. So thats not something that any non-technical user wants to do. This quoted comment assumes there's a web app that is suf…

> a link that looks like `ipfs://12340-9q5ui1j2;lk3rjq;ladksfj` won't scare those same people off Why would non-technical users be looking at raw URLs? Surely links "look like" blue underlined text; or a button; or whatever?

>Why would non-technical users be looking at raw URLs?

Surely you jest. Have you heard of this thing called the address bar? Do you think non technical folks don't know what "Google.com" is?

How many normies working office jobs get it drilled into them "don't open links if you don't recognize the domain"?

How do normies share urls? They paste them into Whatsapp group chats.

Re: IPFS Maintainers Winding Down

#219

Post by inigyou » Wed, Aug 26, 2026, 3:02 AM UTC

frollogaston wrote: post #217

inigyou wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bittorrent isn't slow to start.

It takes at least 5 seconds, which is slow for this use case

Contact tracker (2 RTT UDP), contact some peers (2 RTT TCP, 1 RTT handshake, 1 RTT piece request and response, assuming a very small file). That's 5 RTT, about on par with HTTP 1.1 and TLS (though there's no TLS here).

Existing bittorrent software is heavily optimized for batch downloads of big files, but that isn't in the protocol.

Re: IPFS Maintainers Winding Down

#220

Post by rinse12 » Wed, Aug 26, 2026, 6:55 AM UTC

mmastrac wrote: post #63

I'm currently on sabbatical looking for volunteer work. I always thought IPFS was an interesting project, might be happy to pitch in some of my now-free bandwidth.

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