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Comment by neutronbits | Hacker News Reader

Wow! What an ignorant view of technology adoption! Almost, every revolutionary technology you see today (right from radio and A/C current to personal computers and deep learning) did not work fine once upon a time. It is because people kept saying, "it will work one day", and continued working on them that we have these technologies making our life simpler these days.

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> "it will work one day", and continued working on them that we have these technologies making our life simpler these days.

You unknowingly make my point. I have nothing against people working on new technologies until they work. That's a strawman on your part.

But, this isn't a case of working on something until it works. The headline of this blog is, "HTTP is obsolete. It's time for the Distributed Web." IPFS is not ready to replace http, and it won't be until the cost vs. benefit ratio works out for enough people.

true for revolutionary new technology. Not true for incremental technology that aims to replace an existing similar technology. Especially if the incremental tech is something that most "normal" people don't really care about (such as hosting content on the internet).

A distributed web (including proper mesh networks) has the potential of changing the status quo from constantly worrying about data limits and "I don't have any wifi" to "normal" people having constant "internet" access everywhere they go.

I think they don't care much about the underlying technology, but they will notice when some apps work faster and without a mobile data connection when others don't.

Couldn't people build webapps like this today by heavy caching and storing data locally?

To some degree yes, but with IPFS that becomes easier in my experience.

Even with static websites you usually need to have a web server you are able to connect to, or have to go out of your way to add a Webworker that makes is offline-capable. There a single address that is served via an IPFS gateway behaves better with less additional tooling.

In terms of caching, think of IPFS as making every node in the network also a dynamic CDN, with content automatically moving closer to the people who use it - including into your LAN.

> changing the status quo from constantly worrying about data limits and "I don't have any wifi" to "normal" people having constant "internet" access everywhere they go.

So will rapidly increasing data allowances and cellular coverage. Plenty of European countries have effectively unlimited data packages and effectively complete network coverage.

Crucially, whatever gaps there are in this are very likely to get filled through already underway progress much faster than a distributed web on mesh networks will get to a usable stage.

I am glad you are in a country where that seems to be the case or are just more optimistic.

The status quo however is colleagues of mine discussing which of the main carriers to choose to get decent 3G/LTE coverage in Berlin(!), after all these years of progrrss, so I think it's worth to consider other options. Rural Germany is even worse. My data caps are also about the same (less than double) as they have been 5 years ago.

Even if it won't take over as the dominant technology, it might create enough pressure on the carriers to act.

Ask any non-technical person whether they've ever been bitten by link-rot! :)

Content-addressing doesn't alleviate the problem 100%, since content can still fall off the network - but it improves the structure of the network in a way that makes it tremendously easier to keep content around. It's not up the original source of the content (owner of the domain name) to keep the content around - anyone can help out by keeping a copy.

My colleague Matt addressed this beautifully in a recent talk at the NSDR Symposium: https://archive.org/download/ndsr-dc-2017/04_Speaker_3_Matt_...

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