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Comment by loup-vaillant | Hacker News Reader

Get rid of HTTP, then.

The web doesn't scale, and that makes it the great centralizer. If publishing ran on peer-to-peer protocols from the beginning popularity would never be an issue.

There is this slight problem about asymmetric bandwidth and ISP-wide NAT, though…

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Would be great.

I've been toying around with IPFS lately, but I still haven't figured out how me getting the repo leads to me joining a global network of peers, with data travelling seamlessly between us. I want the latter, just don't know if it's even supported now.

Unless I'm misunderstanding what you mean, the easiest way would be to just add the browser plugins. Then you can use ipfs just like the 'normal' web.

What I mean is this: IPFS is meant to enable a p2p data network (web and beyond). How do I become a part of such network after I download IPFS from the project page? I haven't figured this out yet.

Well you have to install it. It has a daemon that keeps running, and it "seeds" the content that it has in cache AFAIR.

https://ipfs.io/docs/getting-started/

IPFS serves things on demand. I wanted IPFS to be something like Freenet -- you publish content and the network makes sure to replicate it at least 3 times, automatically -- but IPFS doesn't work that way.

There are some free pinning services (pinning = inform a bot that you would like your content replicated, and then it takes care of it), including at #ipfs on irc.freenode.net, but the network itself doesn't come with such functionality and after I filled an issue on GitHub, it turns out the authors don't think IPFS should do that. Looks to be out of scope for them.

Outside of that, `ipfs add ...` publishes your content's hashes so everybody who knows the hashes can fetch the content from you.

(You also have `ipfs name publish ...` for publishing a website hash to IPNS, which can later be resolved via `ipfs name resolve <peerID>`)

IPFS does not work like that, true. However, Filecoin might fit what you want. It will kind of work like a pinning service where you can exchange pinning content on nodes for filecoins. It'll work together with IPFS.

http://filecoin.io/

In my eyes it's a good start. But I am afraid the incentive will bring in malicious actors with time. :(

I'd much prefer something like Freenet's automatic replication model. Luckily IPFS allows it, through its own facilities for extensibility -- if we have the will and resources to invest in that functionality.

That's true, and in the case of video there is an option in the form of Peer5, but you're still going to have a bill to pay if your content becomes very popular very suddenly.

Personally, I don't. I pay for maximum bandwidth, and if there's a spike it will just throttle. This has its own set of problems of course but at least I don't get surprised by the bill.

They do have "flexible" schemes where the bandwidth can increase as demands grow (of course, you pay accordingly), but that's not the default.

(I'm hosted by https://www.gandi.net/)

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