Comment by requilence | Hacker News Reader

Comment by requilence | Hacker News Reader

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> What happens when the files get unpinned?

Peers who are interested in the content pin it.

- E.g. your teammates share the same files

- Your family have a shared photo album

- Your devices(mobile+desktop) share your private files

- Anytype provides nodes that store a small amount of encrypted data for free. Later we will provide an option to buy more backup space on our nodes to pin your encrypted data

- You also will be able to set up your self-hosted anytype node to pin your data

> Who pins the files when my laptop is offline? Who pays for this?

Currently, Anytype provides a small cache on our public nodes to store the last encrypted versions to mitigate offline/online problems.

You also will be able to set up your self-hosted anytype node.

> What keeps my files online in the event of high node churn?

- Peers who are interested in the content actually store it

- Anytype nodes

> What happens if malicious nodes join the IPFS swarm and censor key/value lookups

- First, you will do the local-network lookup. E.g. if you are working with your team in the same network you will be able to discover local-network nodes via broadcast msgs

- Anytype provide nodes that index the encrypted content. That nodes expose additional API that can be used to speed up P2P content discovery in that cases while being fully secure (because it is content-addressable)

Okay, so whoever wrote the text for your website is a liar.

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From your website:

> It’s free. No storage or upload limits

You said:

> You also will be able to set up your self-hosted anytype node to pin your data

> Your family have a shared photo album

> Your devices(mobile+desktop) share your private files

> Later we will provide an option to buy more backup space on our nodes to pin your encrypted data

So, it's not free. I'm paying for storage one way or another -- either by keeping it all on my always-on devices, or by paying you to pin it.

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From your website:

> Anytype works without a central server, so only you have access to your encryption keys and data. All apps run locally and exchange data directly in a peer-to-peer way without exposing it to intermediaries even when you work across devices and with others.

You said:

> Anytype provide nodes that index the encrypted content

So, when I'm not on the same LAN as the computer, Anytype is not only _not_ peer-to-peer by default, but also Anytype gets to see when people write data and learn how much data they wrote.

> Okay, so whoever wrote the text for your website is a liar. > So, it's not free. I'm paying for storage one way or another -- either by keeping it all on my always-on devices, or by paying you to pin it.

Not the author, I don't think you can accuse them of lying. I suppose you could use any provider to pin stuff. There might be free IPFS pinning services and non-free ones. You may not need to use AnyType at all.

> So, when I'm not on the same LAN as the computer, Anytype is not only _not_ peer-to-peer by default, but also Anytype gets to see when people write data and learn how much data they wrote.

I don't agree with your assessment at all. It is ok in P2P to have intermediary nodes that handle pinning, hosting, mirroring, propagation etc when the node is offline. That's the only way P2P can be viable.

What's important is that the protocols and standards are open. And that you can choose your own providers to handle the above mentioned services (pinning, mirroring etc). That seems to be the case here. You're criticism is unnecessarily acute.

My feed back would be to be clearer on how it works - because your initial set of users are going to be more technically proficient.

Thanks for answering, Jeswin! I agree we will add a more detailed explanation to our site

Jude, thanks for the criticism. I’ll clarify a few things (however, Jeswin here actually covered all the answers really well, thank you Jeswin): > So, it's not free. I'm paying for storage one way or another -- either by keeping it all on my always-on devices, or by paying you to pin it. We meant that you don’t need to pay anytype anything when you use your own disk space or your own resources. > So, when I'm not on the same LAN as the computer, Anytype is not only _not_ peer-to-peer by default, but also Anytype gets to see when people write data and learn how much data they wrote. As Jeswin mentioned, these nodes are part of p2p model. What’s important is that these nodes cannot read users’ data (on top Anytype does not have central registry of users, so does not know who is who) and finally also as Jeswin mentioned it will be possible to change the default nodes provided by Anytype or disable them at all (in exchange of degraded reliability).

Based on this discussion, we will add a more detailed explanation of how it works to our site.

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