However I would love to see a reference implementation that works at minimum and not just drains out your computer up to latest resource it may have. If we're so near the "production-ready" status of the reference implementations then I think that goal will never be achieved.
How does an IPFS powered website do dynamic content? User sessions? Is all the client's session data encoded in the IPFS address itself?
Even if there's no user sessions, but the page content updates, how do you continuously point clients to fetch the right updated page (e.g. how would you implement a Hacker News style aggregator that updates every minute)?
IPFS does static content just fine - CAS-es are wonderful for that - but websites are much more than static content.
I would love to see all these problems solved and IPFS working very well in the next few years, but I'm afraid the IPFS people are very good in making press releases and presentations, but not in delivering really good software as they say they do.
Anyway, they have no obligation to deliver anything to anyone -- except maybe the people who entered the Filecoin ICO.
Now, obviously, they're under no obligation to deliver anything. But I'm trying to understand what you mean when you say:
The vision of a IPFS-powered web working is beautiful
Actually, I think the fact that IPFS developers are trying to replace HTTP one of the reasons they fail so awfully in producing a good IPFS for static content. They try to integrate much more stuff than actually needed in the protocol.
For instance, see P2P Reddit ( http://notabug.io ) which:
- Running in production with GUN.
- Handling about 42,000 monthly visitors. ( https://www.similarweb.com/website/notabug.io )
- Has done ~1TB in 1 day of decentralized traffic.
You can then configure GUN to save to IPFS as the blob/storage engine (or we have filesystem, localStorage, IndexedDB, S3, etc. as options).
It is basically like having a P2P Firebase :) with IPFS plugin.
I popped on notabug.io just now, and the chat is full of swastikas, racial slurs, and the most up-voted posts are primarily anti-gay misinformation.
I see you wrote GUN, which I'm sure was no small feat, and it looks like an impressive piece of technology. How do you feel about your tech being primarily used in this way?
Warning: image contains racial slurs and swastikas: https://i.imgur.com/0kdxzVR.png
A little later in the chat, the developer chimes in and talks about some stuff. Then some people angrily accost them for censoring things. If the Nazis and the racists aren't censored, I don't want to think about the odious content that is.
Edit: Here's a thread from... yesterday, where a bunch of users are mad about the "censorship" of the developer hiding a swastika post from the front-page (not even deleting it or removing it from whatever their equivalent of a sub-reddit is): https://notabug.io/t/whatever/comments/509b9189ece85515671d3...
You can call this "decentralized reddit" a bad place, as it really is, but you can't say it's because it's "full of right-wing people". These adolescents are not "right-wing people".
At some point... is there a difference? If you find yourself in a group "ironically" screaming you all support X for long enough, soon you'll find that some of you actually support X. And that you enabled those people.
I wonder what's changed for early adopters of new tech compared with the original internet in the early 90's? Early adoption was still demographically skewed towards certain groups, but i don't recall this brand of right-wing thought being so prominent.
But it's hardly surprising:
"The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all."
In this case, it means that you'll see people who are predominantly censored from other places already use this tech to avoid further censorship. In US right now, at least, that tends to be alt-right, white nationalists etc. For a more detailed take:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/07/22/freedom-on-the-central...
The guy actually built a P2P moderation tool (anyone has their own "glasses" that filters based on your policy).
notabug.io is suppose to be running a curated homepage (nab.cx not curated) but I think he said it broke a week ago when he was modularizing his code.
NAB usually isn't this bad, lot of the people on it are anti-altright, but altrighters certainly can drown them out.
But it does look like NAB has become more toxic over time. :(
Previously, I was pretty neutral "do what you want with it".
Now, I shifted to be more opinionated about what I want to see built on top.
Primarily, apps that spread Open Source economics through art (music, etc.), to draw a crowd of lovers/creators not haters/destroyers.
Somehow I forgot about it.
As you say:
> I think all censorship should be deplored. My position is that bits are not a bug.
> — Aaron Swartz (1986 - 2013)
Edit: But I like https://nab.cx/ better. Or at least, as an alternative.
AIUI, that's the problem that IPNS is designed to solve (https://github.com/ipfs/specs/blob/master/naming/README.md#i...). HN controls its private key, enabling it to be the only one who can update the record at the signature of its public key, and those IPNS records have nanosecond precision expiry timestamps and TTLs, meaning they can update at the frequency of their choice
I agree with the sibling comments that (at least as the IPFS is currently specified) having a user session would be problematic. It's theoretically possible that _your_ HN front page would have an IPNS record of IPFS://mdaniel.news.ycombinator.com and then we're back to the aforementioned expiry semantics. Upvotes would have to travel out of the IPFS network, but in some sense, I think that's expected since one wouldn't want an upvote to be archived, but rather the resulting content to be
There are a ton of weird perspective changes when thinking about the content addressable web, but it might not be the 2050-esque far away that it seems
SSB = Social-like P2P data.
GUN = Firebase-like P2P data.
SEA = End-to-end encryption. ( https://gun.eco/docs/SEA )
DAT = GIT-like P2P data.
IPFS = Images/assets.
WebTorrent = Video-like P2P data.
Only saw your comment now, will reply on Twitter too - long time no see since #hashtheplanet !
Notabug basically does everything Reddit does + more. Would that qualify as a larger app?
What in particular, what do you think would be difficult?
Perhaps a worldwide swarm of drones creating a mesh network.
Satellites are too big of a target, and not very transparent; e.g. we wouldn't know if someone went up there and installed some snooping hardware. The same can be said about drones, but with proper swarms the chances of you connected to a compromised drone would be less.