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Comment by furi | Hacker News Reader

To add to this there are* serious issues with naming. I wrote an app that ran on IPFS last year and throughout testing there was a persistent problem with needing to issue the testers with a new hash/link for each new version because IPNS, IPFS' decentralized naming solution, effectively doesn't work. It's supposed to give each node a unique name which can be repeatedly mapped to different hashes but publishing a new name -> hash mapping can take several minutes and then lookup of that name can take several minutes even on the node that published it in the first place. Names also need to be republished every 24 hours or so or they disappear from the network, which in my opinion harms the claims of decentralization.

* = unless something has radically changed in the last few months and they just haven't closed the GitHub issue: https://github.com/ipfs/go-ipfs/issues/3860

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I consider IPNS fundamentally broken and have stopped using it. ENS is better in almost every way and is extremely reliable so it's not that big of deal.

IPFS and ENS work pretty seamlessly together (https://medium.com/the-ethereum-name-service/ethdns-9d56298f...), but some folks also want the mutable pointers layer of IPNS too. We're working on making that faster: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XniIDIXU8RE&t=10s

How can I register an ENS domain/id? I've found very little practical info on a cursory search.

There's probably a simple article out there but I'll summarize it a bit:

You go to https://manager.ens.domains/ to register a .eth address and on the settings page for your domain you add a Content record and point it to ipfs://Qma7nxS98CAb2BTaxLJBSFozxxSp5XTu6tMtCrKcRQ9ByV or whatever the IPFS hash of your website is.

After that you can visit your site at https://myname.eth in a browser that supports ENS/IPFS or you can go to https://myname.eth.link in any browser and see your website.

This is what I needed, thanks!

I created a service to make it easy to buy and configure ENS domains in one step. Hope it helps! www.namestack.io.

That's helpful, thank you. Unfortunately it looks like .eth domains have already been squatted to hell.

I really wish everything written about IPFS would just ignore IPNS, and stop presenting it as a standard part of IPFS. The thing IPNS tries to do can be done better by the existing DNS system (which works fine combined with IPFS) or blockchain-based systems like ENS. IPNS is a slow incomplete tech demo glued to the rest. Ignoring IPNS won't impact your understanding of the rest of IPFS. I don't think people relying on IPFS even use IPNS for anything but a curiosity, and it's so bad that I expect many people get turned off of IPFS because they get confused by IPNS's flaws or assume that the rest of IPFS works as badly.

IPFS is good at content-addressed storage. IPNS is not part of content-addressed storage. Tutorials about IPFS should ignore IPNS, and talk about alternative ways to link to IPFS links, like using DNS.

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