Dcentralized url shortening service base on IPFS | Hacker News Reader

Dcentralized url shortening service base on IPFS

t.bdaily.club

56 pointsfacert20 comments

So these various IPFS services are getting pushed to the front page of HN just because they use IPFS?

Honestly, in most cases I do not see a use for decentralizing. In this case, the shortened URL still depends on a central host (bdaily.club or whatever). Whether the underlying link is stored in a decentralized manner is completely meaningless, because all the links will still be broken once the host is gone.

> Whether the underlying link is stored in a decentralized manner is completely meaningless, because all the links will still be broken once the host is gone.

Precisely - I think there is a lot more value in _replicable_ services and not decentralized once. That is - a link shortener that lets anyone make a copy of it without reading all the links but in a way that replicates all the links.

That would allow for anyone to "compete" with the original service.

That's the thing though, since it's decentralized you could create a new service, e.g. bdaily.horse, and just change the domain of all the links: the short url paths and full url targets are persevered. Not saying it would be trivial to fix but it's possible, which is a good deal better than today.

At present, this version does have some problems and doubts, such as http://t.bdaily.club/ek5wz This link also jump to the centralized service. If you use the long address of ipfs directly, https://gateway.ipfs.io/ipfs/QmT2AKLygsgMa6r2AvxiJP31JTqSMMK..., the decentralization problem is solved, but the link is too long. there are some solutions (1) shortening the domain name address (2) with a blockchain (such as IOTA), mapping the short address and the hash address.

This service is just an attempt on IPFS, I hope to have this service inspired, then there will be a more usable, more robust app on IPFS.

Can someone please explain to me why this is cool? What are the benefits of using a decentralized url shortening service?

Because centralized ones can go out of business and thus break your URLs? Google URL Shortener/goo.gl, from what I quickly read, seems to do their best to keep existing short URLs working, but I'm sure some people got scared when their discontinuation was announced.

The problem with centralised URL shorteners is that the site can shut down for any reason.

It doesn’t make money, it isn’t important to the maintainer, there’s a db failure etc.

With a decentralised system it’s a lot more resilient to failure.

> The problem with centralised URL shorteners is that the site can shut down for any reason.

Yeah. The same problem is with IPFS as well. Someone has to seed the content of files in IPFS. If no one is seeding, the file will not be available. I don't honestly think anyone else is going to seed the URL files other than the people who run this site. If this site goes down everything does down as well.

> It doesn’t make money, it isn’t important to the maintainer, there’s a db failure etc.

If this site doesn't make money it's not important for the maintainer of this site to seed the files as well :)

And on top of that: what practical applications does a URL shortener have nowadays? There was a time when they were pretty popular for posting links on Twitter, but Twitter made t.co an automatic part of their service in 2010.

I think it’s useful any place where space is constrained.

- on the terminal (clickable short URL that doesn’t wrap is great!)

- QR codes (shorter URL will encode to less squares which means easier to scan)

When you need to publish some huge URL without copy-paste tools (paper, documents, phone call).

As an example, I use Git.io to include my GitHub projects on my resume. Using one repo as an example, the link got shortened from 37 characters (a few links would quickly clutter the resume) down to 10 (short and sweet, can fit the link inline with the name of the project and the technologies used).

I don't like URL shortening, and in almost all cases should not be in use (if needed in the few cases where it is helpful, you can host your own short version of a URL on the same server; in this case it is likely that both URLs break simultaneously if it is broken). Rather, should see the URL that it will be directly.

As far as I know, IPFS is not really decentralized. Some people say it is if others pin your files, but there are no guarantees that anyone will do that. I’ve worked with startups who asked me to use IPFS and this is what it looks like: setting up an ipfs server to store files on a cloud provider, adding extras for redundancy plus a file backup system. At present it’s sufficiently more complex than rolling out S3 + glacier backups with no tangible benefit besides “decentralized” cred

It’s possible this will change via Filecoin or others, but at present the term “decentralized” is misused here.

Its the same as torrents. I'd call this decentralised.

The benefit is that hot files get served from the swarm instead of just your nodes, just like bittorrent. It also prefers closer nodes, so data doesn’t have to travel as far. Also, like bittorrent, a single multihash or gateway URL is enough to strongly validate the file contents, unlike S3 URLs.

I keep meaning to write a sniffer that watches the p2p net for file objects, runs magic on their filetype, and indexes the indexable ones. That would be moderately useful.

I agree but I also disagree. I think there is always a line of confusion between distributed and decentralised.

The Protocol is decentralised, then the users/services can decide how to replicate the files. If everybody will have the same files, it will be 100% distributed.

We can argue that Bitcoin with SPV clients is just decentralised and not distributed as well.

I don't agree to that

The implementation is neat. But I honestly don't get the point of this site. The shortened URL is of the form http://t.bdaily.club/34fe6.

When you open http://t.bdaily.club/34fe6 the server redirects you to a file in IPFS which has a javascript script tag to redirect further to the actual URL.

My question?

* What's the point of this service when you can directly redirect to the actual URL instead of redirecting to the IPFS file?

* Users can also alternatively share the IPFS file directly (eg https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipfs/QmfFs8v6hXK258ov9bXGuqzUVsJ...). But the problem is IPFS URL/hash is bigger than the urls itself in most cases. I think the point of URL shortner is to have a small URL. This is more like a URL enlarger service.

* Most importantly someone has to seed the IPFS files so that the links keep working. What's the incentive for the website owners to seed the files for free? There is no guarentee that the URLs will work if someone open it after a month or year.

I think it might be a good place to plug my decentralized url shortener (based on ethereum blockchain) https://0x.now.sh

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