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Comment by dymk | Hacker News Reader

I see this comment often when IPFS is discussed - but the devil is in the details when it comes to replacing the underlying tech of "the web" with something else.

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.

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Dynamic content is not the problem. I don't want dynamic content. I think HTTP and servers are the way to go on dynamic content. I just tried, for years, to use IPFS as a way to distribute static content (you know, stuff that will never ever change, even if that stuff is referenced from a dynamic location), and the problems I encountered were so many I finally gave up.

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.

If you want IPFS to be a replacement technology for the web, you need dynamic content. Else, it's a useful static content distribution network, but it's not "the web", not even in the sense of what the web was in the 90s, or the "web" any more than Bittorrent is.

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

Only handling the static part of webhosting is something, but it's not everything.

I'm under the impression that the original comment was referring to an IPFS-powered web, rather than the web being powered by IPFS. Good ol' HTTP servers will continue to form the web as we know it, and IPFS can provide a new web of static content.

So at best IPFS is a replacement for something like S3? If I want to create an application, I can have the static content portion of it hosted on IPFS, but the brunt still on my own servers? That’s a very niche use case, I would say. And while it allows me to host my copy of the anarchist’s cookbook, it’s not going to be good for much else.

I don't want to hijack the discussion from IPFS, but Swarm has good ideas with respect to dynamic content if you're interested how that might work in a decentralized setting, for example see Swarm Feeds presented here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92PtA5vRMl8

I didn't say it's everything. I don't think HTTP must die or will die. HTTP is great, it's awesome, wonderful. I would like IPFS to exist along with HTTP, that's what I said.

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.

> how would you implement a Hacker News style aggregator that updates every minute

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

For dynamic data, you need to use a CRDT system like GUN ( https://github.com/amark/gun ).

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.

It's a shame that so many P2P advocates - or at least the ones using the stuff built with P2P tech - are very loud alt-right types.

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?

I just clicked on notabug and didn't see any swastikas or racial slurs. Are you lying?

You think somebody would do that? Just go on the internet and tell lies?

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...

Well, to me these seem like some adolescents trying to be funny and go against the mainstream. They post swastikas and call racial slurs because they know they shouldn't be doing that. They aren't really nazis, right? They don't even know what a nazi is.

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".

> They aren't really nazis, right?

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.

Well and besides, the actual content on the site seems to skew alt-right pretty heavily, whether the racial slurs and swastikas are ironic or not. Taken altogether, it paints a pretty clear picture of a voat-style forum that will alienate most other people if it stays that way.

They're there because they've been excluded from mainstream sites. It may seem extreme, but one way to assess how uncensorable something is by its content of stuff that you hate. Even stuff like child porn that any sane person would hate. So you just ignore it.

I get what you say. But it's arguable that most of those actual WWII Nazis didn't really know much about anything. I mean, watch Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will". There's stuff in there that reminds me a lot of Young Pioneer camps (not surprising, I know) and Woodstock (except for the lack of drugs). My point is that they were just belonging to something that seemed cool.

The sexual misinformation is on the front page. The racial slurs and swastikas are in the chat. Great look for a site.

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.

This is true of pretty much any tech that is anti-censorship in some way or another (anonymizing and/or decentralized).

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...

:( few months ago NAB didn't have this problem. :(

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.

Thanks for your response. I hope NAB gets better again.

Hey, very cool!

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.

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