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Neocities is implementing IPFS – distributed, permanent web

ipfs.io

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Re: Neocities is implementing IPFS – distributed, permanent web

#81

Post by [deleted] »

viraptor wrote: post #36
mortenjorck wrote: post #5

Reading this felt kind of like the first time I read a writeup on Bitcoin. There's the same sense of throwing out some old, formerly immutable rules here, the excitement of something that's going to test some boundaries and inevitably clash with some authority (how can you, for instance, comply with the EU's "right to be forgotten" when that information is scattered into a redundant mesh?). Interesting times ahead fo…

Right to be forgotten however applies only to search engines right now, doesn't it? The articles the results used to point to still exist. So a redundant mesh itself doesn't seem to apply here.

[deleted]

Re: Neocities is implementing IPFS – distributed, permanent web

#82

Post by [deleted] »

viraptor wrote: post #36
mortenjorck wrote: post #5

Reading this felt kind of like the first time I read a writeup on Bitcoin. There's the same sense of throwing out some old, formerly immutable rules here, the excitement of something that's going to test some boundaries and inevitably clash with some authority (how can you, for instance, comply with the EU's "right to be forgotten" when that information is scattered into a redundant mesh?). Interesting times ahead fo…

Right to be forgotten however applies only to search engines right now, doesn't it? The articles the results used to point to still exist. So a redundant mesh itself doesn't seem to apply here.

[deleted]

Re: Neocities is implementing IPFS – distributed, permanent web

#83

Post by mintplant »

colordrops wrote: post #74
adrusi wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With IPNS, which allows the creation of links whose destination can be mutated by whoever has the private key, you can implement quite a lot of interactivity. You won't ever be able to implement facebook over this platform, but you can replicate all of its functionality by using a tumblog-like architecture. Facebook's design is inherently centralized, and therefore doesn't really fit into the world of IPFS. The idea…

> Facebook's design is inherently centralized Not really. There's no reason you couldn't implement Facebook's core functionality with personal servers containing a profile at each node and a pub/sub (or even just pull) system connecting each node with its friends.

So, diaspora*?

https://diasporafoundation.org/

Unfortunately it never really caught on.

Re: Neocities is implementing IPFS – distributed, permanent web

#84

Post by zkhalique »

We've been thinking about this problem for quite some time. My friends and I are passionate about re-decentralizing the web. The biggest challenge we've come across is this:

Many users want to do things with other users

That means there has to be a way to persist state and history (of a group activity, an evolving resource, etc.) across machines. Mental poker is still very hard to do for groups. Since most clients will not have amazing uptime, that means you still need a network of servers. Servers that manage security behind a firewall.

So, the conclusion is -- for group writable data, the best you can do is have servers be completely interchangeable, but you will still need servers and networks of servers.

The good news is, many of the challenges are orthogonal to each other. Someone's building a Mesh network, for instance. Someone else is building the protocol layer with IPFS. We're building the social layer for this coming web.

Re: Neocities is implementing IPFS – distributed, permanent web

#85

Post by chipsy »

adrusi wrote: post #30
giancarlostoro wrote: post #6

So is this primarily for static websites? I don't see dynamic websites going too well with this system. Edit: If someone like GitHub supported this for GitHub pages it would be a great step forward for this as well.

With IPNS, which allows the creation of links whose destination can be mutated by whoever has the private key, you can implement quite a lot of interactivity. You won't ever be able to implement facebook over this platform, but you can replicate all of its functionality by using a tumblog-like architecture. Facebook's design is inherently centralized, and therefore doesn't really fit into the world of IPFS. The idea…

I'm thinking about the discovery problem and how this relates to distributed technology now. File storage looks solved but creating content relationships like lists of similar files sounds much harder and still reliant on a authority that curates and filters the spam. Lost data in IPFS will be "buried treasure" in that nobody has the link to it anymore, but it still exists in a literal sense.

Interesting to think about.

Re: Neocities is implementing IPFS – distributed, permanent web

#86

Post by ossreality »

sdoering wrote: post #79
_prometheus wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two pieces of (coming soon) good news: - very soon, you wont need to install anything to use IPFS. it will "just work" with js on today's browsers. - for best perf, yes, we need browser implementations. and... those have begun :)

OK, as apparently .js is the defacto thing to build cool sites, I for one will be left out here. On sites not known to me, I typically block most (read all) .js at first, just to make sure that these sites do not leak too much information about me to external tracking tools, advertisers or the like. So using .js seems to me a bit problematic in regards of people not enabling it by default (but this is an absolut mino…

So then disable it and connect to ipfs in other ways, instead of lecturing everyone on how 90% of the web you use everyday is broken

Re: Neocities is implementing IPFS – distributed, permanent web

#89

Post by roel_v »

- So I want to download a file over IPFS today, how do I go about it? What sort of client do I use?

- Now I want to view a whole web page. Is that possible?

- Let's say I have a site that I want to publish through this, along with a bunch of files (images, downloads). I'm serving that site now through Apache. Do I need to 're-publish' each file (using the command in the article) every time a file on there changes? Or is there some automated way to have a distributed version of the latest version of my site? I mean, it's fine and dandy that people can store cached copies, but what I want is that if there's an update to my software, that people actually get the latest version when they click 'download', not that they get an old version because some dude somewhere made a mistake at one point 'hosting' a static version of my site and not updating, and visitors just happening to use that version because that dude is closer to them (in network topology terms) than I am.

Re: Neocities is implementing IPFS – distributed, permanent web

#90

Post by Confiks »

ZenPsycho wrote: post #87

how does IPFS compare to bittorrent's project maelstrom? http://project-maelstrom.bittorrent.com

In my view Maelstrom instantly disqualifies itself because it's kept closed source. I really don't understand how BitTorrent (the company) can take itself seriously preaching about "truely neutral" networks.

I've worked with IPFS, and it's really amazing. The development on it is very active, and the main developers are easily accessible for questions on Freenode#ipfs. I've been trying to build a tiny consensus protocol on top of it, but its native support for signing is still a little rough around the edges (and of course I've been distracted by a thousand other side-projects).

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