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Comment by zaarn | Hacker News Reader

A link pointing to the data is fairly useless if nobody is seeding it.

I have torrent files that point to the correct data but it's impossible to obtain because the data they point to isn't being seeded. But just like in IPFS, if I have the correct file I can seed it again simply by adding it to my torrent client into the torrent job.

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At least a third party can prevent link rot in this situation. Link rot in the standard web is really bad these days. We do have the internet archive that is trying to prevent it, but then you still need a tuple of (URL & access time) and you have to hope that one organization cached it.

The link rot still occurs on IPFS when the content isn't being seeded, I don't think that's an improvement.

Seems way more tractable to me than solving link rot in the regular web.

Not really, if some niche content with 20 people who read it goes offline, it is very unlikely the content will come back.

And then someone will have to put in the money to pin/host the content anyway if you want to keep it online.

Link rot is solvable with tools such as WARC Proxies.

> Not really, if some niche content with 20 people who read it goes offline, it is very unlikely the content will come back.

You think these 20 people will stay offline forever?

You think these 20 people will keep that niche website they read once in their cache forever or even pinned?

Torrents die all the time because nobody bothers to donate bandwidth to strangers for content they barely care about.

How is IPFS different?

It is different in that a completely unrelated third-party can pin this content of their own volition, and it will continue to be provided under the exact same address/hash. In the web, the domain owner is the single entity who can ensure survival of the content.

Torrents do the same thing. Dat also does that. Even better in either you don't have to think about pinning. Why should IPFS be the one?

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