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Comment by Aelius | Hacker News Reader

Could you give me a little insight into your use case?

I'm personally excited for ipfs, but I've stopped following releases / am feeling burnt out by the slow pace of development. Still, good to see creative uses pop up in my internet bubble!

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I was checking my old bookmarks and big part of them was outdated (404). Average lifespan of a website is 100 days https://blogs.loc.gov/thesignal/2011/11/the-average-lifespan... , but I would like to keep some articles to read and share even way later. I thought that it would be nice to have simple tool, which doesn't require setting up another account. Just backup and add a link to bookmarks. Because all technologies needed to fix the problem are already here, I just put them together.

Is it really a backup? Ipfs has no 'upload' so if you clear your local storage, everything will be gone. I think it's unlikely that multiple users will generate the same content hash.

Right, it's a local, sharable copy. Actually Readability cuts off so much HTML, that it's quite possible that 2 users will generate the same hash even from very dynamic website.

Really?

What kind of hash are we talking about here? And generated from what?

I could imagine the opposite, generating 2 hashes from the 'same' article, due to different markup being stripped. Not what you suggest though.

If you export your bookmarks you could autoparse them and ipfs pin and ipfs links to a longer lived archival node running on you main host or offsite/cloud.

You could plug IPFS Cluster's proxy endpoint (:9095) instead of the IPFS daemon API endpoint and get everything you add replicated to a backup peer.

Unfortunately it's unlikely to be a backup, since everything will only live on your local computer. You might get the content from some other user if, by chance, they generated the exact same bytes, but it's rather unlikely.

To back things up, you'll want to pin to an external server like Eternum.io.

I'm not sure whether this is a brilliant or a terrible idea. I have a tendency to collect my to-read stuff in tabs, and every once in a while I clean up my old tabs, read some of the stuff I intended to read, and discover many of them don't exist anymore. So a backup is great, but actually not having to read all the stuff I collect saves me a lot of time.

Sounds like a storage backend for your own Pocket or Evernote Web Clipper.

Coincidentally, I was (slowly) researching doing something similar with Scrapbook and some kind of synchronization a-la Dropbox. I guess this implementation sidesteps the whole issue of organizing files on the fs, though I'm not sure if that's entirely unproblematic.

Considering how much money the people behind IPFS have raised through Filecoin IPO, I'm surprised the pace of development is still so slow.

Man, you should say slow more times. The thing hasn't evolved a millimeter in the last 3 years. It's so full of bugs it's impossible to use for any use-case besides first demo hello world cat photo. It's also hell of slow and eats all your computer resources.

I was an enthusiast until 3 weeks ago when I lost all the references to my objects (twice, in two different manners) because of "a minor bug in mfs" and wasn't able to recover them.

> Could you give me a little insight into your use case?

I'm not the OP but a use case I might find useful is if you have a blog, want to comment on a news article, and want to have a cached copy of that news article. Since web pages often go way after some time, making sure the news article stays up might be useful. This is particularly true if the entity writing the news article decides it is embarrasing to them and wants to flush it down a memory hole.

In addition, you could continue to reference that cached article even when you go offline - so pinning it to your local node effectively makes it available to any of your locally connected devices without needing to ping a distant server (aka - you can take your entire "toread" stack camping without one-off planning =] )

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