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Comment by superkuh | Hacker News Reader

I guess it's eventually distributed but but still centralized in terms of using ipfs and having to go through gateways.

A truly distributed means of hosting is everyone hosting their own websites from their home connections. It's simpler and no central authorities are needed. Home connections are plenty fast these days. And the best part is that you get tons of storage space and you don't have to 'upload' anywhere.

You can also make real websites instead of 'single page application' javascript monsters.

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> Home connections are plenty fast these days.

No, they're not.

Sure, if you live somewhere where you can get 1 gigabit fiber, maybe. But I know Comcast/Xfinity throttles the crap out of your upload. Even if you get their 1 gigabit plan, your upload is limited to 35 mbps [0].

To put that into perspective, if you have a 1 megabyte image that ends up getting linked on reddit and 100,000 people try to download it in an hour, then you'd need over 200 Mbps upload. Very very few home users have that kind of connection.

[0] https://www.cabletv.com/xfinity/internet

This isn't how IPFS works FWIW. Your upstream connection is only needed to feed the small number of fetches that aren't cached somewhere else in the network. Much the same as a traditional CDN in that respect.

Ah okay. Thank you for the clarification.

It sounds similar to Freenet then, with perhaps less of a stress on anonymity.

> But I know Comcast/Xfinity throttles the crap out of your upload. Even if you get their 1 gigabit plan, your upload is limited to 35 mbps [0].

Odd that you choose their second highest tier to fit your narrative instead of just jumping to their highest tier with is actually symmetrical 2Gbps up and down fiber.

Are you talking about the "gigabit pro" plan[1]? That is a $300/mo with a 2 year minimum subscription. That clearly is not a residential plan. You might as well just pay for professional hosting at that point.

[1] https://www.cabletv.com/xfinity/internet

> That clearly is not a residential plan.

That's exactly what it's marketed as. There are also plenty of symmetrical fiber services with hundreds of Mbps of upload from Frontier, Verizon, AT&T, and others.

Just because it's marketed as a residential line doesn't mean it's common at all. Besides, that line, or even the gigabit line, is not available in a very large market.

> There are also plenty of symmetrical fiber services with hundreds of Mbps of upload from Frontier, Verizon, AT&T, and others.

Most people don't have a lot of options.

The options in my neighborhood are either 150 mbps down/5 mbps up with Comcast, or 35 mbps symmetrical with Frontier.

If you have more than two options, and one of them is gigabit, you're extremely lucky. A considerable chunk of America only has 1 option, and the extreme majority doesn't have gigabit down, let alone gigabit up.

> Just because it's marketed as a residential line doesn't mean it's common at all

Just because something is expensive and therefore unpopular to your average consumer does not mean the product itself does not exist. If we're talking about residential ISP speed, then all residential ISPs and their respective tiers should be included.

Otherwise you're just picking and choosing data points to fit a narrative which is deceiving.

> That is a $300/mo with a 2 year minimum subscription.

Also, that $300/month is the introductory price. Lord knows what the actual price is once the initial 2 year period is over.

That's hardly available to the average home user.

It's odds that in his example he use the second highest tier to fit the average user? I call that generous if anything.

If you think 35 mbps isn't enough to spare a couple megabits for hosting a personal website then your personal is entirely different than mine.

Are you slipping back out of context to talk about business again?

In this case you're still beholden to your ISP and whoever controls them. True decentralisation would be something like mesh networks, making use of only local device capabilities.

If your ISP is not a dumb pipe then everything else is already lost.

Mesh networks only work if you pay the big money for rental on building roofs and existing towers. This money, and so height, and so line of sight, is why cell networks work. You might get some non-profit going in areas especially conducive to it (ie, high population density cities where residents have access to their roofs, or coastal areas with large mountains).

> truly distributed means of hosting is everyone hosting their own websites

That means "self-hosted". Distributed hosting means you can't host it in one place. I agree though, that one might consider it as a form of decentralized hosting if everybody hosts their own stuff, which you also totally can now that we have cheap computing power like raspis.

the cheapest computer we all have are home routers. would be nice to them coming with ipfs preinstalled (and perhaps turned on by default!)

There are some open source router OS projects. I bet they could be convinced to consider such a suggestion with some pull requests, emails and/or a few sponsoring $$$.

Comcast charges $10 for every 50 GB of bandwidth used after 1,024 GB a month. Which may be prohibitive.

And, unfortunately, some of us don't have a choice of ISP at home.

Yeah that's unfortunate. Luckily on HN are also many people who live in more developed countries. ;-)

And on a more serious note: Even in your situation a self-hosted solution might be more free. Then don't host it at home, but discuss with universities, hacker/maker clubs and companies in your surroundings and host it behind their internet connection. Usually you need one member of such an organisation to support you and then you can simply do it.

You can also use the tool to host things locally. You just need to start an writable ipfs gateway first, see https://blog.florence.chat/tutorial-how-to-host-your-own-fil...

IPFS is "truly decentralized" in the sense I think you mean. The publisher runs the origin node. It's the http gateway that isn't. Except it kind of is in that you can use any IPFS http gateway. Ideally clients would use native IPFS, not http, but turnkey native client support in browsers is not here today.

The browser Brave is working on implementing native support for IPFS so the gateway is not needed: https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/819

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