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Comment by Jamieee | Hacker News Reader

https://ipfs.io/ seems pretty cool. I've been meaning to check it out, but not seen any uptake yet.

Same here. IPFS seems to have been lumped into the whole "crypto" scene because of filecoin. In my opinion, IPFS is much more interesting and potentially beneficial to individual freedom than crypto. The problem is the only people really talking about it are people focused on crypto, also forcing dapp conversations to focus on quick money vs. long term usability/functionality. I don't hold the money conversations against anyone...just not interested in that side of it. More interested in the preservation of knowledge long term and how/if that gets built. IPFS seems to be an interesting potential step towards those goals.

I find it really cool that Brave implemented IPFS.

There's still a bunch of questions around filecoin, but if you set aside the token and speculative nature, the it's the first realistic proof of storage system and represents (1) a departure from proof of work that's sucking up the power output of several countries for no good reason, (2) a useful base for IPFS to store its bits persistently and (3) perhaps funding Protocol Labs so they can continue to advance this state of art.

Libgen added a feature to download files with ipfs. It is ridiculously faster than a normal download.

Played around with it a few weeks ago. It was super easy to get going with it. I just dunno what benefits it gives over traditional storage? besides the classic crypto, "censorship resistant". (Also hello HN, this is the first time I've posted anything :p )

I agree with you. And we also need technology like dApps that don't cost when running it by opcodes -with its vm, but use hourly pricing like cloud based hosting, so it will run your software deliberately without throw decentralized capabilities and it will enable decentralized economy to the mass.

I want to see a variation of Signal to add BlogPost like interface.

It could then use IPFS to host "Public Facing" posts. People could pin - or pay for pinning - their posts.

IPFS is what I hope will lead to further democratization of the internet.

Could you expand on what you mean by a variation of Signal? To me, Signal’s main feature is just that it’s a reliable E2E encrypted messaging app, implying two ends to communication. A blog post interface implies one-to-anyone communication, so I’m confused what part of Signal you want to emulate.

Yeah, I haven't communicated it well.

I am aiming for a decentralised-FB like experience on Signal. And I honestly think it is feasible.

On FB, you tag a post with intended recipients(default:All "Friends"), people log in and get fed these posts with FB fiddling along the way.

Signal with a redesigned UX could show a doom scroll of posts that friends send you. Not that I think this is great, but user adoption for familiarity.

Signal E2E delivers the message, the new UX displays the posts. You apply heuristics as you want, all without ads or data gathering by a MITM.

But... public posting is a thing. I am hoping that IPFS combined with cryptographic signing for authentication, could fill that role.

Hence my comment that IPFS could hopefully lead to democratization. Although, I am also concerned that IPFS will also lead to "undeletable" content, but that seems to be almost a thing anyway.

Scuttlebutt is the software you're looking for. Check out the patchwork client. Posts are public by default but you can make them encrypted so only your friends can read them.

There's also cabal chat which is based on the same underlying technology but is chat focused rather than Facebook like.

This is very interesting! Thank you!

I keep seeing this pop up, but honestly I still don't get it. I'm also weirded out by the filecoin aspect of it. Could you maybe explain it better for the dumb folks like me?

Think of it as a distributed filesystem with content addressable by hash values. If you want to publish some content instead of posting a torrent file and seeding it, you can announce the content on IPFS to your IPFS peers. Anyone else can now find it by hash (or by name if you use IPNS). If anyone else downloads it, like with a torrent, they'll begin sharing it back out creating redundancy and, potentially, reducing access time for others as more people are sharing it out (imagine you're on a 10Mbps network connection and the only one sharing it versus having 100 others sharing it out, even if they're also all on 10Mbps connections it will be faster). Content can be "pinned" which ensures it remains on your IPFS node, if it's unpinned anything you download will eventually disappear (basically an LRU cache). So if you download the entire run of Dungeon Magazine but don't pin it, it will disappear if you continue downloading content via IPFS when the cache you've set aside for IPFS fills up (eventually). But if you pin it, the content will remain hosted by your node indefinitely, even if no one ever accesses it or pins it again and the original disappears.

Filecoin is a separate thing (mostly), and can (kind of) be thought of as pinning-as-a-service. It's built on a private IPFS network, not the main public one most people use or are directed to. So it's using IPFS, but it is not IPFS.

Is there a client that I can run and point at an existing file structure to make it all available on via IPFS? Perhaps with limiting on outgoing bandwidth?

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