> Return control back to the user after most (not all) of the PUT RPCs have succeeded and continue with the remaining ones in the background.
Making things faster by doing less (and not the same) been speeding up computing since forever! Can't help but feel like it's slightly misleading to call the providing ("publishing") faster when it's not actually doing the same, it's just that most parts turned async instead of waiting for confirmation.
Wouldn't this lead to the problem where the user things everything been provided properly, but once others try to find it, the records haven't yet been published? As far as I understand, it'd still take mostly the same amount of time until the entire CID (not just some of them) are available to others, the only thing that got "faster" is the end-user UX of the one providing?
Are the defaults still leaking your whole internal and external IP allocations to the dHT still?
Its security posture was absolutely fucking gross the last time I reviewed it.
And of course, there's a shitcoin bolted on as well. Last thing I want to do is feed into FileCoin. Of course, everything new these days has some financial interaction crap bolted on to entice speculators and ilk.
Last I was told about it, there was no way to delete stuff from IPFS. Nothing enforceable, at least. Setting aside that public stuff is "impossible" to delete on the internet, there's something appealing to me about being able to shut off my server. Feels like that is less possible with IPFS hosted content.
Does anyone have some perspective for me about removing content?
Is anyone still (or has anyone ever) used IPFS in production?
I’m not talking about technology demos such as Wikipedia-on-IPFS (which indeed worked and was impressive) but where IPFS is actually being relied on for some functionality.
NFT artwork, if you count that. Briefly checked, the ones that were traded for the most were using IPFS rather than HTTP. But I also don't trust that these aren't self-wash sales (easy given the "NF" part), also NFTs are dumb.
Yeah.. IPFS is a bit disappointement. I was a bit exceited about it back in the day. Recently, I wanted to download sth large from archive.org, I used torrent (and my legacy torrent client) and it worked like a charm!
It seems pure HTTP tracker + Torrent is good enough.
At meta, there was a project for delivering binaries of internally built libraries / binaries to dev laptops using a private ipfs network. This was live for at least some period of time.
I use it for about 5 years, to publish javascript file (proxy auto-configuration) and serve the contents over different gateways.
It is a huge server traffic saver.
Used to use it to host different static websites on custom domains while Cloudflare's gateway was working, stopped using it for this purpose since its sunset in 2024.
the thing that prevented me using ipfs in anger.. (granted i may not have looked hard enough)
was that i couldn't have stuff in ipfs, and access it via posix filesystem at he same time. i'd have to store things twice.
fine for publishing, but not for having a live data set that is both used and published at the same time, as you can do with torrent.
It's not literally IPFS but atproto/bluesky is using most of the bones of IPFS (IPLD) to do their entire data propagation and event broadcasting.
And tbh it shouldn't be terribly difficult to extend the existing infra to supporting a full IPFS based system but I don't think anybody has considered it worthwhile yet.
ATproto uses just the bits it immediately needs even if it could probably benefit from the other parts long term (ex for archival relay stream preservation).
Having worked on libp2p‘s DHT (Double Hashing for rust-libp2p) for a bit two years ago, it’s really great to see that there are improvements.
To get to CDN level speeds though on dense networks, I still see it as an architectural flaw to not somehow encode network topology into the PeerID / identity in the DHT. A start would be to use the five RIRs. If you want to be more sophisticated, and I spent a lot of time theorising about this, you could have a dezentrally governed anycast IP address of Geo DNS to bootstrap new peers into their neighbourhood and couple that into their DHT identity. But do you want to put BGP into the hands of a decentralised system? Could you even do it in the governance structure of the internet?
Btw when we were working on our project HyveOS, we used Batman-advs routing table to quickly (really really quick) bootstrap new peers into the system.
We shouldn’t expect bodies and companies that benefit from centralization to give us crumbs. Remember IPv6 global multicast? ISPs killed that on sight.
We need to get encrypted mesh networking (Yggdrasil, CJDNS, FIPS etc) out there before it’s too late.
Slightly tangential to the article, which seems interesting, but the main issue with IPFS was the horrendous performance of clients which I seem to recall related to having a refresh storms, sparse routing tables, unreachable peers as well as lookup speeds. Mostly the reputation was so bad that people didn't bother with it, I dismissed it for my own project. If your only users are crypto-grift projects you're in a bad place.
23 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 50.5 ms ] threadMaking things faster by doing less (and not the same) been speeding up computing since forever! Can't help but feel like it's slightly misleading to call the providing ("publishing") faster when it's not actually doing the same, it's just that most parts turned async instead of waiting for confirmation.
Wouldn't this lead to the problem where the user things everything been provided properly, but once others try to find it, the records haven't yet been published? As far as I understand, it'd still take mostly the same amount of time until the entire CID (not just some of them) are available to others, the only thing that got "faster" is the end-user UX of the one providing?
Its security posture was absolutely fucking gross the last time I reviewed it.
And of course, there's a shitcoin bolted on as well. Last thing I want to do is feed into FileCoin. Of course, everything new these days has some financial interaction crap bolted on to entice speculators and ilk.
Last I was told about it, there was no way to delete stuff from IPFS. Nothing enforceable, at least. Setting aside that public stuff is "impossible" to delete on the internet, there's something appealing to me about being able to shut off my server. Feels like that is less possible with IPFS hosted content.
Does anyone have some perspective for me about removing content?
I’m not talking about technology demos such as Wikipedia-on-IPFS (which indeed worked and was impressive) but where IPFS is actually being relied on for some functionality.
It seems pure HTTP tracker + Torrent is good enough.
It is a huge server traffic saver.
Used to use it to host different static websites on custom domains while Cloudflare's gateway was working, stopped using it for this purpose since its sunset in 2024.
Neocities used to publish their websites over IPFS, this feature got broken (for years) and finally got removed: https://github.com/neocities/neocities/issues/352
Not using it in production but i found it pretty cool to test
fine for publishing, but not for having a live data set that is both used and published at the same time, as you can do with torrent.
Maybe this is possible to implement using fuse/9p fs
And tbh it shouldn't be terribly difficult to extend the existing infra to supporting a full IPFS based system but I don't think anybody has considered it worthwhile yet.
ATproto uses just the bits it immediately needs even if it could probably benefit from the other parts long term (ex for archival relay stream preservation).
If also made the sites available on IPFS, but that was a secondary concern.
Btw when we were working on our project HyveOS, we used Batman-advs routing table to quickly (really really quick) bootstrap new peers into the system.
Ah… sometimes i really miss working on this.
We need to get encrypted mesh networking (Yggdrasil, CJDNS, FIPS etc) out there before it’s too late.