Hacker News Reader

Comment by ireflect | Hacker News Reader

CDNs make a lot of sense for improving load times and for the overall efficiency of network utilization, but I worry that the current ones (Cloudflare et al.) contribute too much to the recentralization of the Internet.

What we need is for gateway.ipfs.io to use geo-dns such that it can serve this purpose, and IPFS gateways can be run all over the world by regional ISPs, universities, and even individuals.

View on HN

Yeah, +1 to this. I'd use a CDN if it wasn't all owned by one company. I run a static site on IPFS, and just have two nodes located in NYC & San Francisco that my local gateway is always connected to.

It does a pretty good job for USA visitors (which is where the majority of my traffic comes from). But it'd be ideal for IPFS to use geo-dns, along with FileCoin implemented so that I can pay for nodes in other countries to have my content pinned.

Also, my site uses Service Workers to cache all of the content + TurboLinks, which drastically speeds up every subsequent page transition. I'm not sure if that's doable if you're using an external CDN like Cloudflare for all of your resources.

Has the team done much since they raised $250 million? I've only seen one or two releases since, and the commit graph looks very slow. It's been a while since I checked, though, I might be out of the loop.

There's been a lot of activity with the JS implementation of IPFS, but I'd agree that the core IPFS development has been lackluster lately.

Do you have a blog on setting this up per chance? I'm interested in reading more about IPFS (haven't looked at it since I first heard about months and months ago). Their website seems a bit light on the details bar a link to a whitepaper I haven't dared to look at yet ;)

Here is one: https://medium.com/@merunasgrincalaitis/how-to-host-your-ipf...

A fundamental issue with CDNs is that you have to trust them. Even for public content, who accesses what is valuable private information. I can imagine IPFS making this worse, when anyone who wants to observe what is accessed by whom need only mirror it.

If the SV/Startup set ever move past this ridiculous "outsource all the things" idea, now is as good a time as any to enable realistic self-owned CDN's using a lot of low-resource nodes across a variety of providers around the globe/your service area.

I definitely agree. The point I wanted to make here is that setting up replication for a static site is trivial due to their static/stateless nature (you can just use a CDN.) These same qualities make distributing a static site over IPFS easy to do too.

Or have a CDN (e.g Cloudflare) support IPFS and get the best of both worlds.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com