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IPFS, Again

macwright.org

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Re: IPFS, Again

#211

Post by neiman »

momack2 wrote: post #191
neiman wrote: post #42

We've been playing a lot recently with the concept of IPFS websites. We even created a plugin ( https://github.com/almonit/almonit-plugin - unreleased officially yet!) for websites that combine IPFS with ENS (a decentralized DNS). Our repository contains a list of decentralized websites using this method. We found about 20 so far. Technically , IPFS work well for us, but we made sure to have a server seeding our webs…

Almonit looks cool. The IPFS in Web Browsers working group has also been collaborating with Nick Johnson et al from ENS to create an “EthDNS” server to resolve ENS names to IPFS content in a decentralized way (along the lines of https://github.com/mcdee/coredns ). Should be a working demo in time for IPFS Camp in ~2 weeks!

Sounds interesting. Is there more info about it or I'll have to wait for the IPFS camp to satisfy my curiosity?

Re: IPFS, Again

#212

Post by neiman »

_prometheus wrote: post #200
neiman wrote: post #42

We've been playing a lot recently with the concept of IPFS websites. We even created a plugin ( https://github.com/almonit/almonit-plugin - unreleased officially yet!) for websites that combine IPFS with ENS (a decentralized DNS). Our repository contains a list of decentralized websites using this method. We found about 20 so far. Technically , IPFS work well for us, but we made sure to have a server seeding our webs…

This is excellent feedback! Thanks! > We even created a plugin ( https://github.com/almonit/almonit-plugin - unreleased officially yet!) for websites that combine IPFS with ENS (a decentralized DNS). This is great! We’ve been wanting something like this for a while-- and there are a bunch of utility in bringing ENS and IPFS together. A lot of the problems you mention are known, and being worked on. Let me describe a…

Wow, thanks for the fantastic reply:-)

Peerpad looks awesome, and is exactly in the direction of stuff we're interested in. Ironically, a friend sent me its link literally 5 minutes before I saw your comment. Great minds think alike.

We've been playing a bit adding a p2p network in the background of static ipfs website (using webRTC). That way if a website has enough visitors, they could mimic to each other many functions that normally a server does. I did similar things in previous projects I was involved in. But there it was native softwares, where here there are extra challenges caused by the (relatively) limitations of web technology.

Re: IPFS, Again

#213

Post by davidgerard »

jasode wrote: post #173
blurbleblurble wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> altruism doesn't scale Incentives don't exist on a one dimensional scale from pure greed to pure altruism. People have lots of contextually dependent reasons for storing or sharing information. Those reasons are dynamic and super diverse. In your case, why would you need lots of people to seed your 100 GB of personal vacation photos? You can seed them just fine! But don't use bittorrent, use the right tool for the…

>, why would you need lots of people to seed your 100 GB of personal vacation photos? I think you're missing some context for the motivation of Filecoin. One of the elevator pitches is that it can disrupt cloud storage like Amazon S3.[1][2] People do put personal files (e.g. via a cloud backup service) on cloud storage like AWS S3. Instead of a paying a centralized Amazon, Filecoin claims they have a way for money to…

> the motivation of Filecoin

was to sell tokens. Take an existing idea, build an incomplete implementation with a token attached, talk about features that don't exist as if they do - ICO success!

Re: IPFS, Again

#214

Post by davidgerard »

kebman wrote: post #105
drawnwren wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen this argument before and tend to disagree. There is certainly greed, but I think the larger problem is that crypto doesn't have users. I don't think it's particularly novel in 2019 to say that a successful app is built off of the feedback of its users. Any app, regardless of intentions or engineering prowess, is going to struggle if it doesn't have a sizeable user base providing feedback (and devs who liste…

I think you're touching on an important point. There are already other vessels for the niche that cryptocurrency fills—at least as far as websites and web services go—that are way easier to both implement and use. With that said, I'm still rooting for cryptocurrency as a general competitor to state-backed currency, that in turn gives people all over the world more freedom to conduct their business without state or co…

> Like the dollar isn't also used for crime...

Crypto people say this like it's an argument in their favour - whereas it actually means: even for its one and only genuine consumer use case, crypto is utterly trounced by conventional currency.

Re: IPFS, Again

#215

Post by davidgerard »

drngdds wrote: post #164
cryptica wrote: post #27

I work for a cryptocurrency company as a software engineer and I definitely agree that a lot of projects backed by crypto funds tend to over promise and under deliver. It's clear that those who control the funds aren't always the best at judging tech talent. Big tech corporations have had years to settle down and build a reputation to attract top talent. Crypto companies tend to attract greed over talent and it shows…

Are there any ICO-backed projects that didn't overpromise and underdeliver (or not deliver at all)?

tl;dr no. http://archive.fo/7H3MM

Re: IPFS, Again

#216

Post by yason »

throwaway9d0291 wrote: post #58
yason wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder why? It seems to be common with native speakers. I'm not native in English but, for me, it would seem to be nearly impossible to mix these two words even in a moment of carelessness. They mark greatly differing meanings and thus they practically live in different slots in my brain. Even a blind typo won't explain it because 'a' and 'e' are not too adjacent on a qwerty.

I think because in some English dialects "than" and "then" sound very similar and many people (myself included) write by basically transcribing their internal monologue.

Interesting, this would definitely explain these errors. Similar to there's/theirs, they're/there which are similar examples of the same. Writing out words based on such a phonetic memory would explain all that.

But the next question to wonder is whether this is English specific or person specific?

Is it that native English speakers form their language primarily through phonetic patterns and translate back to spelling from there, or is that some people simply crunch spoken language and other people crunch written language in their heads?

I definitely start from letters and words, and I'm often lost at how to pronounce something because, in English, you can't deduce pronunciation from the written form. In many cases you just have to "know". But I'm not a native speaker so can't tell if this is just because of how my brain works or because I learned English later in lafe.

I can't backreference to my native language, Finnish, either. Finnish is spoken exactly as it's written. If you know how to say a word you know how to write it, and vice versa. So the phonetic and written forms do not differ.

If anyone native to English could verify that what they keep in their head is "written English", that'd be a valuable counter-point to suggest it just depends on the person.

Re: IPFS, Again

#217

Post by yason »

autonome wrote: post #193
yason wrote: post #55

I don't think this is ultimately an IFPS problem. How I've always understood IPFS is the protocol being a decentralized blob storage. You would use it in place of a CDN, to share files, or other building blocks for something higher-level. This is in contrast to browsing where there are established semantics on addressing absolute and relative URIs, and clustering relevant content under hierarchical addresses in the U…

Yes, IPFS addresses some of the use-cases of HTTP while solving other problems where HTTP falls short. It isn't a complete drop-in replacement, but does set up a foundation for an internet that will last longer and (at some point) perform better across varying network conditions. > but I think this is (vaguely) analogous to building > a website based on IP addresses and port numbers, not URIs. IPNS is a naming soluti…

All right so there is already work ongoing to solve these problems, and that work is built on top of IPFS instead of extending the base protocol, and the author who just insisted using plain IPFS was thus suffering from expected difficulties as IPFS really isn't the direct answer to that particular usecase.

Re: IPFS, Again

#218

Post by StavrosK »

whyrusleeping wrote: post #208
StavrosK wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear you, it's just that the current way the daemon does pinning is unacceptable. For example, I can't tell my customers how much of their file I've pinned, or, in some cases, if I've pinned it at all. Maybe I'm in a small minority of people who are interested in this feature, but how do people pin things without it? Do they just `screen ipfs pin ` and leave that terminal there for ever? Wouldn't it be in the proje…

So, at a high level you want more than just the backgrounding the pin task, you also need to be able to tell what the progress is, periodically. This probably means we need to do something with the api endpoint output (i was initially thinking 'just throw it away and mark completion'). > in some cases, if I've pinned it at all. What cases would those be? If the file is pinned it should always show up in an `ipfs pin…

> you also need to be able to tell what the progress is

That would be nice, but not really required.

> I assume your service is a server side app that is making requests to the ipfs node, right?

Yes, exactly.

> You could set some background task in that application that just waits on the `ipfs pin add --progress` call

I did that, there were problems with the fact that you can't have too many pinning calls waiting due to resource constraints. I can't just have 100k requests open and waiting, they time out, I need to restart the server, things happen. At that point, every single task needs to fire up again and make an API call to the server.

I did the same thing with batching, but then long-running pins (files not in the network) would block and new files that were on the network wouldn't work. This happens with IPFS Cluster too, I just don't have to write my own code to worry about it.

Believe me, I've spent lots of time on working around this, and the workaround can only be so good with the current system.

Re: IPFS, Again

#219

Post by acdha »

autonome wrote: post #194
davidgerard wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IPFS is from the crypto people. This is what blockchain advocates put forward as the solution to mass storage for their blockchain dreams. IPFS is basically BitTorrent with magnet links - hashes to address content, if you want to be sure your obscure content will stay around then you have to seed it, etc. There's some fancier stuff on top, but if you know that's how it works, all else follows. You can tell how "block…

IPFS is useful to blockchain projects because of the permanence of content hashes. That doesn’t mean it’s not also useful to many others. QRI is using it as the publishing medium and backing store for all kinds of data sets, for example. No blockchain, just shared storage across interested parties. You make a really good point about communicating readiness - the author of the post is expecting more from pre-alpha sof…

IPFS has had public releases since 2015 with rhetoric implying general utility, not to mention $300M in funding. If it’s still “pre-alpha software” that’s not a mere communications problem.

Re: IPFS, Again

#220

Post by jmozah »

StavrosK wrote: post #70
langitbiru wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget Swarm. https://swarm.ethereum.org/ So Swarm vs DAT vs IPFS.

If it has a blockchain in it, it immediately crosses the "too heavy" line for me.

No. It doesn't depend on blockchain except for the ENS resolution.
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