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Comment by eitland | Hacker News Reader

FWIW: StavrosK has actually been putting some serious effort into making IPFS accessible.

See here for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16521385

It's not really an accessibility issue so much as a performance one. If it was a reasonable alternative to something like the rsync daemon I'd use it all the time.

Unfortunately the performance issues and overhead is just too much.

IPFS isn't really an alternative to rsync, but the rest of your point stands.

Not in the general case, no. But one of the major uses for rsync in synchronizing mirrors, and it could very much be a replacement for rsync in that particular niche.

For example mirroring project gutenburg.

Ah, yes, you mean pinning a specific set, you're right. Unfortunately I've found that the way the daemon does pinning currently doesn't lend itself to that use case (a single unavailable file will stall the pin for hours).

Better rsync support is actually in the works (though probably still a ~quarter out to land end to end in go-ipfs). The two main components are improving ipfs "mount" support, and adding metadata support into unixfs so we can only update modified files. See details here: https://github.com/ipfs/team-mgmt/blob/master/OKR/PACKAGE-MA... -- mount currently has IPNS read support but write support needs an owner to get it over the finish line and unixfsv1.5 (with metadata) should be landing in js-ipfs later this week!

Thank you, I really hope IPFS improves.

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