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Orbit – Distributed, serverless, peer-to-peer chat application on IPFS

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Re: Orbit – Distributed, serverless, peer-to-peer chat application on IPFS

#61

Post by kirushik »

badsock wrote: post #51
notwhiteknight wrote: post #2

Interesting. Can someone explain how IPFS works? Is it like Tor? I don't have any interest in running some sort of distributed content farm that might place CP on my computer. Even if the chance of that happening is 0.00001%.

The best one-liner I've heard: it's like one giant git repo that's inside of one giant bittorrent. My (imperfect) understanding is that it runs like a market: you temporarily store and forward blocks ( In general, I don't think IPFS is a great place to do naughty things - it's not big on anonymity, and since blocks drop off the network if they're not being actively requested, to keep something up there you have to st…

As far as my understanding goes (and I've spent a day discussing it with IPFS authors in person this September), IPFS doesn't store or forward anything you haven't explicitly requested. So you participate only in sharing things you're aware of (and bad things are rather easy to remove from that cache) — and that's a deliberate design decision.

Things in local IPFS cache can indeed be "garbage-collected" (and there's a CLI command to trigger GC manually) — but IPFS daemon has a concept of _pinning_, and pinned IPFS nodes won't be collected, and will remain stored (and being shared) as as the pinning goes.

Re: Orbit – Distributed, serverless, peer-to-peer chat application on IPFS

#62

Post by jawbone3 »

lkjhgfdsa57 wrote: post #47
notwhiteknight wrote: post #2

Interesting. Can someone explain how IPFS works? Is it like Tor? I don't have any interest in running some sort of distributed content farm that might place CP on my computer. Even if the chance of that happening is 0.00001%.

Freenet encrypts content, parcels it into chunks and distributes those chunks amongst peers. Does this meet your definition of "distributed content farm that might place CP on my computer"? I'm curious because I've seen objections to Freenet for that reason yet the content stored is in no way CP. No bad content can be reconstructed from the data in your store. Not just because it's encrypted but because you'd be hold…

Those chunks are intended to be used as child porn, and the "you can't tell its child porn" objection is a weak one for those who don't want to be part of its distribution on moral grounds.

Re: Orbit – Distributed, serverless, peer-to-peer chat application on IPFS

#64

Post by kefka »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #48
kefka wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure can. What IPFS does, is looks at network topology to determine 'closeness' of nearby IPFS nodes. It then prefers 'closer' nodes, to speed up transactions and requests. For example, if we take Gangnam Style video, it spread to something like 100M views rapidly. With Youtube, that's 100M individual downloads. With IPFS, it would be 1 or 2 downloads per local network. And then those machines would provide the local…

That's neat, though I think in some cases, say Intellectual Property on your LAN, or other things, you may want those services ignored I would think? Sounds like setting up IPFS has to become a rather isolated process for some? Which I find kind of limiting if you're forced to go through hoops for something that could be opt-in / configurable at the very least?

Well, all I can defend against that, is that it's still "Alpha Software". There's stuff that's very much not for private or secure networks.

But for working with data that's intended to be open, it's wonderful.

Re: Orbit – Distributed, serverless, peer-to-peer chat application on IPFS

#65

Post by zerognowl »

lgierth wrote: post #20
zerognowl wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "As seductive as a blockchain’s other advantages are, neither companies or individuals are particularly keen on publishing all of their information onto a public database that can be arbitrarily read without any restrictions by one’s own government, foreign governments, family members, coworkers and business competitors" https://blog.ethereum.org/2016/01/15/privacy-on-the-blockcha...

There is no blockchain in IPFS.

Oh okay, I was confusing it with this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZeroNet

Re: Orbit – Distributed, serverless, peer-to-peer chat application on IPFS

#68

Post by lgierth »

doublec wrote: post #67
zerognowl wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh okay, I was confusing it with this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZeroNet

There's also no blockchain in ZeroNet.

Isn't Bitcoin a pretty integral part of ZeroNet though? (I haven't tried it out myself yet.)

Re: Orbit – Distributed, serverless, peer-to-peer chat application on IPFS

#69

Post by doublec »

lgierth wrote: post #68
doublec wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also no blockchain in ZeroNet.

Isn't Bitcoin a pretty integral part of ZeroNet though? (I haven't tried it out myself yet.)

No. The addresses used for the sites are compatible with bitcoin addresses, that's about it.

Re: Orbit – Distributed, serverless, peer-to-peer chat application on IPFS

#70

Post by computerphage »

adrianratnapala wrote: post #58
fiatjaf wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point is that chat messages are meant to be ephemeral, so it was a waste to store them in IPFS and hash them and make them identifiable by a unique useless hash in the entire world forever. But since I posted the comment I realized that this is actually a cool feature for a chat app to have.

When I choose to use a chat application, of my reasons to use it is so that there is an accessible record of the thing. More concerning to me is with IPFS is privacy. I would want to encrypt it so that only my chat partner and I could read it. But then would it be interesting in enough to live for long on the network?

IPFS isn't in the business of providing storage for free to users. If you want it stored forever you should pin it or use a service that does the same. Just because the name is permanent doesn't mean the data is unless it's in demand from someone.
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