Zhoreeq/ipfd: An imageboard, but images are stored in a peer-to-peer network | Hacker News Reader

Zhoreeq/ipfd: An imageboard, but images are stored in a peer-to-peer network

github.com

62 pointsaiNohY6g35 comments

I really want this kind of thing to work but how can you prevent it from instantly becoming a cesspool of both illegal and distasteful garbage?

If someone wants to continue to pin something distasteful, that’s their storage dime. There will need to be a mechanism to report and moderate objects that are illegal in a jurisdiction so people who don’t want to actively host and serve illegal content don’t (a hash blacklist or similar you can action or your node can subscribe to).

Tangentially, in a perfect world, the Internet Archive is the IPFS pin of last resort, a payment mechanism allows for the Archive to collect micropayments for perpetual hosting (so the web isn’t going through the perpetual boom bust cycle of img hosts), they can dark content that gets DMCA reported, but they’ll nuke or reject content both illegal and/or exploitative.

Someone has to do that moderation work for exploit images. Every major platform does it and contributes to abuse databases, but new and edited content continue to require constant surveillance. Even people paid for it don't want to deal with that, I don't think the internet archive want to either.

Even if there were illegal content, couldn’t it be distributed and encrypted on the host machines in such a way that there would be no liability for hosters? Imagine the hosts only possess encrypted file fragments, rather than unencrypted whole files, that get served in a peer to peer fashion on demand.

If you end up with all fragments for some objectionable content stored on a machine under your control, and law enforcement can apply a decryption/retrieval key to extract that content while the machine isolated from the network, you're at best going to make yourself an interesting great case over what constitutes 'possesion'.

I guess that gets interesting real quickly, since with a descriptive enough 'key' you could assemble almost any digital file from entirely arbitrary data as short as two bits.

IPFS isn't really built for it - at least, not with anything built in, but this is exactly how Freenet works.

I was under the impression that ipfs defaults to pinning added files? If that's the case, then many wouldn't be aware of the act, or could be said to have chosen to pin a particular item if the service adds instead of cats.

There is a lot of nuance to what happens and when.

If you "ipfs add" a file, ie take a local file and add it to ipfs, the default is to also pin it. This is most likely what you want.

If you just fetch or cat a file, it will still put it in the local store but it will not pin it. However you still could serve that content until it is GCed from your local store.

Pinning is the action of getting the content into your local store and preventing it from being GCed in the future.

All that said, your point is still valid. Viewing a file is enough to also make you serve that content, and it's very non obvious when you are and when it will be purged.

The storage is distributed but the database is hosted on the server. Moderation works the same if an image was posted from Imgur or IPFS, the post in the database is edited to remove reference to the content. It doesn't matter if the host continues to host it. That's their problem.

As any other service has shown it's not possible. To even comply with basic legal requirements uploads have to be screened through anti-abuse filters like any other site.

P2P no longer has platform protections, you can't claim that some illigal image you're storing isn't of your own action. This is different from TOR where you're just passing through unknown, encrypted non stored network traffic.

Your IP is exposed in any actual P2P network, meaning that if you happen to be the hoster of an illigal image you're toast from the start. All it took for the FBI to take down silk road was one single IRC connection unproxied. That's a dangerous game to play.

Centralization is a lot more about legal, safety, money, and convenience. Especially legal and safety.

Pick only one: freedom or censorship. If you don’t prioritize optimizing for freedom, why bother with something like this? Just use Reddit. It’s a lot easier to implement and (I imagine) to use.

Probably the ideal end state for services like this is to aggressively filter your own feed, not to censor the service itself.

> Pick only one: freedom or censorship

This is a weird American meme that I wish would die off.

Please elaborate on why he's wrong?

There are forms of speech that infringe on the freedoms of other people.

Therefore censorship and freedom are not a dichotomy, they are linked dependencies.

> There are forms of speech that infringe on the freedoms of other people.

This is a nonsense authoritarian meme that I wish would die off.

Literally every single legal system on the planet accepts at least a few limitations on speech when it infringes on the rights of other people. If that is authoritarian, then everywhere is authoritarian.

I don't think you'll find too many people who think fraud should be protected speech, for instance.

The tolerance paradox

Popper is a retarded pseud and if you take “the tolerance paradox” seriously you should stop trying to make philosophical or political arguments. All it means if you think it’s relevant is that your personal philosophy is internally inconsistent and unstable.

If you would expand on that I could explain why you’re wrong.

This is a difficult conversation to have asynchronously and over text, and it’s also a difficult one to have with someone acting in bad faith. If you really want to play, please start by answering: does America currently have free speech?

If all men were angels, we would not need government.

That's as simple of a truth at the heart of the American constitution as any.

Maybe you could have hash-based blocklists, and mandate that everyone subscribes to an "illegal" list which governments could freely contribute to.

But then you'd have a new problem: what if someone posts an image of the Tianenmen Square protests? They'll get added to the "illegal" lists despite their value.

So maybe you'd also need a few community-maintained "not illegal" lists with some sort of voting system to decide whether to host something...it'd be messy, but it's not an unworkable problem.

Self-moderation. That's how Millchan does it.

No censorship by design. Not even for <insert evil here>.

https://gitgud.io/millchan/Millchan

By and large, if you desire tasteful things, there are heaps of sites offering forums for your kind of discussion. They come with nice gatekeepers too, as long you do not step on toes.

What there are too little of, are venues for discussion of the _perfectly legal but not necessarily tasteful, pleasant or genial things_. We have way too many walled gardens which are bent upon imposing their worldview on their patrons. We need a lot less of that.

Time and again we are reminded that taking away plentiful online venues for the discussion of things wont just make such discussions disappear or people holding unwelcome views go away for good.

In short, we need perfectly legal and lawful 'cesspools' and fewer curated and coercive walled gardens.

You cannot.

> Files are not stored on the disk, but are uploaded to the peer-to-peer IPFS network instead.

IPFS is just a fetching tool, when you "upload" to an IPFS node your files are just sitting on your local disk until someone else requests them. It's not cloud storage.

Technically both are correct, just your computer was the peer in the peer-to-peer IPFS network.

Regarding IPFS: I'm very disappointed in the progress that IPFS has made. I was extremely excited when it was first announced, but it's taking so long for them to make useful progress they I've lost faith. So many of the projects under their umbrella are incomplete and untouched in a long time.

Regarding this project: Several of the existing centralized imageboards are already breeding grounds for terrorists. The world does not need this.

What were your expectations that have been unmet? Which projects were you excited about that have been untouched?

I'm extremely impressed with the progress that IPFS has made - I'm an active (daily) user, and have implemented archiving systems with their tools. Clusters and pinset management in particular have improved substantially, browser support for ipfs:// natively has started to roll out - to name two things I've worked with recently. The libp2p project itself is another example.

> browser support for ipfs:// natively has started to roll out

Apart from beaker which is a special case, who else supports it natively?

You can track progress here: https://arewedistributedyet.com/programmable-custom-protocol...

The last Chrome release related to this was in September: https://blog.chromium.org/2020/09/chrome-86-improved-focus-h... where they safelisted a number of protocols in registerProtocolHandler().

As it happens, even Beaker dropped IPFS years ago: https://github.com/beakerbrowser/beaker/issues/455

Brave nightly

Perhaps they're just lacking the man-hours necessary to make the progress that you expect. Maybe you could help them out.

Iirc, they've got 200 millions in VC funding, enough to buy 500 dev-years of really experienced devs.

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