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Show HN: Hearth – A Dropbox-like, IPFS-powered personal website publisher

hearth.eternum.io

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Re: Show HN: Hearth – A Dropbox-like, IPFS-powered personal website publisher

#91

Post by jake_the_third »

tomc1985 wrote: post #82
carussell wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're making a category error. IPFS (and friends—like Dat) are analogous to HTTP. Would you call HTTP a silo? No; services like Facebook and Google Drive are silo-y, but HTTP is not. The people working on the P2P web are just trying to make some design choices at the protocol level that facilitates its use in a more decentralized way than the services that HTTP has encouraged to flourish.

Content under HTTP can be thought of as siloed if the user doesn't have an HTTP client. Same effect no?

I don't think so. Everything would be a silo by that definition. A better way to think about it is that silo is something who's owner can cut you off. HTTP is a protocol where ownership does not apply.

Re: Show HN: Hearth – A Dropbox-like, IPFS-powered personal website publisher

#92

Post by jake_the_third »

52-6F-62 wrote: post #58
gervase wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the same question that applies to any other medium, context, or means of interaction: who decides what is illicit? Just because something CAN be used to commit a crime (say, the expectation of privacy in your own home), we don’t eliminate it to avoid that edge case. Not all technology needs a law enforcement backdoor, in my view.

> medium, context, or means of interaction The first analog that is at all comparable is hypertext and the web interface to the internet. This is much the same except it's harder to clean up. Who decides what is illicit? Like I said, I'm not trying to start a semantics discussion. I'm not talking about morally debatable subjects. There are some blatantly disgusting things out there that have ruinous effects on people…

When it comes to imposing your views on others, everything becomes a matter of morals; What you and I may find irredeemable is acceptable to others. There are many activities we engage in that have ruinous effects on others that are accepted as necessary or even celebrated by society, so negative effect on others isn't a meaningful criterium for moderation.

Without determining who decides what is illicit and what isn't, talking about moderation is meaningless.

My expectation that moderation will be done by law enforcement, as is the case with other protocols like bittorrent.

Re: Show HN: Hearth – A Dropbox-like, IPFS-powered personal website publisher

#93

Post by [deleted] »

amelius wrote: post #64
lucideer wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's published on Hashbase, you can access it with any HTTP client (though this of course somewhat defies the point of it being p2p). Otherwise, you will need a dat:// client - Beaker is the main web browser with dat:// support, other clients sofar have more specialised uses, e.g. https://github.com/codeforscience/sciencefair

Would it be possible to incorporate dat:// support into existing browsers as a plugin?

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: Hearth – A Dropbox-like, IPFS-powered personal website publisher

#94

Post by msangi »

npongratz wrote: post #71
amelius wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would it be possible to incorporate dat:// support into existing browsers as a plugin?

Yes. Look for "Support for Decentralization Protocols": https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2018/01/26/extensions-firefo...

Note that it's still going to require extensions

Re: Show HN: Hearth – A Dropbox-like, IPFS-powered personal website publisher

#95

Post by KirinDave »

swsieber wrote: post #89
KirinDave wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IPFS doesn't actually distribute hosting unless someone else goes through the trouble of doing pinning. Some gateways may keep local copies but they're also free to destroy local copies. In the typical deployment where nodes refer to their own local IPFS services, it's often the case that the primary IPFS pin serves the majority of traffic. If we're going to call that "distributed" then so are normal webpages with ra…

We call bittorrent distributed, I think IFPS counts too.

Bittorrent has a lot fewer single points of failure than IPFS.

Re: Show HN: Hearth – A Dropbox-like, IPFS-powered personal website publisher

#96

Post by allannienhuis »

cutler wrote: post #87
carussell wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's pretty much the same security model as regular web content, as you mention. I can't say much about IPFS, but this is not quite true of Dat. The Beaker team is working on a complementary set of APIs to read and write to Dat archives, so you could have, say, a TiddlyWiki-like site that can update itself. It's always been a big problem that the security of file:// URIs is unstandardized. I can publish a repo, for…

I'm not getting this. Fine if you want to go back to the early 90s when sites were all static but what does this model offer for dynamic sites and in particular sites which are intended to scale beyond a single, home user box? How do I migrate my Rails app to dat/ipfs?

My understanding is that you can't - the use case isn't for dynamic websites - it's for static content. You could migrate your angular/react SPA (who's front-end is based off of static content), and continue to use the REST / WS services you already have, but not sure what the point of that would be.

I think it's better to think of this more as a data store than web sites/apps.

Re: Show HN: Hearth – A Dropbox-like, IPFS-powered personal website publisher

#97

Post by carussell »

allannienhuis wrote: post #96
cutler wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not getting this. Fine if you want to go back to the early 90s when sites were all static but what does this model offer for dynamic sites and in particular sites which are intended to scale beyond a single, home user box? How do I migrate my Rails app to dat/ipfs?

My understanding is that you can't - the use case isn't for dynamic websites - it's for static content. You could migrate your angular/react SPA (who's front-end is based off of static content), and continue to use the REST / WS services you already have, but not sure what the point of that would be. I think it's better to think of this more as a data store than web sites/apps.

This is not true. See the remarks about the DatArchive APIs in my original comment. You can also look at Fritter[1], which is a prototype Twitter clone built as a Dat web app.

It's true that there are some types of web apps that exist on the traditional (HTTP) web but that cannot be made as a Dat app, but it's also true that there are a class of apps that could be built with Dat but that cannot be built on the traditional web.

1. dat://fritter.hashbase.io

Re: Show HN: Hearth – A Dropbox-like, IPFS-powered personal website publisher

#98

Post by marknadal »

edjroot wrote: post #46
marknadal wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you intend to use GUN for banking or any globally consistent (CP) system, then yes. However, for everything else, the criticisms no longer apply. GUN is an CRDT based AP (highly-available, partition tolerant) strongly eventually consistent system, and therefore should not be used for banking-like systems. I hate the jargon so sorry to reply with it, but it allow for a quick/concise summary of GUN's tradeoffs. Some…

That's exciting, thanks a lot! I was just considering using a graph database for a future side project. I also read Neo4j was an inspiration. Is there any "human-made" comparison between the two? All I could find was "A vs. B" comparison tables. Thanks again!

@edjroot I don't know if this is any different than what you already saw, but the biggest differences are:

- Neo4j is Master-Slave, GUN is Master-Master (or Multi-Master, or Masterless). Basically, GUN is P2P/decentralized, Neo4j is centralized.

- GUN has realtime updates/sync built in, Neo4j does not.

- GUN has offline-first features, Neo4j does not.

Other considerations:

- Neo4j has its own query language, GUN has a FRP (Functional Reactive Programming) based JS API.

- Neo4j is over a decade old, GUN since late 2014.

- Neo4j is more monolithic, GUN is more microservice-y.

Re: Show HN: Hearth – A Dropbox-like, IPFS-powered personal website publisher

#99

Post by zaarn »

mirimir wrote: post #52
lucideer wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Beaker is a browser that supports http:// and dat:// - you can: - use Beaker to publish/"host" dat:// websites (as you can use Hearth to publish ipfs websites) - use Beaker or any dat:// client to browse dat:// websites - use any browser to browse dat:// websites via http through hashbase.io (similar to eternum.io)

OK, but IPFS sites are just HTTP/S via a gateway. So any browser works. Indeed, there are IPFS gateways on Tor onion services.

The last point mentioned has that too, hashbase.io is a HTTPS gateway for dat://

Re: Show HN: Hearth – A Dropbox-like, IPFS-powered personal website publisher

#100

Post by notheguyouthink »

patmorgan23 wrote: post #83
StavrosK wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) Yep, exactly. There shouldn't be security implications, as long as the IPFS daemon is secure. 2) Again, as long as the IPFS daemon is secure, standard security practices apply. It's just static files. 3) It's all just static files. You get linked to from other files. Same as you navigate the rest of the web. It's not hard to wrap your head around it, really, just imagine that the web was all static files. That's i…

For number 3 literally the web 20( 30?) years ago

I mean, sort of. We had some files that weren't expected to change, but nearly nothing was truly static.

Content Addressable .. content is truly unchanging. Which, imo, is something the modern web is lacking.

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