Introduction to Dwebsites (2020) | Hacker News Reader

Introduction to Dwebsites (2020)

blog.almonit.eth.link

33 pointsneiman41 comments

* on Ethereum

There are probably much more content added to IPFS, zeronet and other projects I don't know about. (yes we can host websites on IPFS: https://docs.ipfs.io/concepts/dnslink/)

Right, depends on definition. We define it as decentralized name system + decentralized storage, but other definitions are fine of course.

Even then, we didn't cover Handshake based websites, so you're correct.

> You may think you own your website, but do you really? What if your host goes offline?

Spin up another one? Plenty of service providers to choose from.

> What if your domain name registrar suddenly gives your name away?

Then I can sue them for breach of contract. There are very few and very specific circumstances where they are allowed to do that, pertaining to my own misuse of the domain.

Furthermore, to transfer my domain requires a hard copy of a random code snail-mailed to my home address from the Ministry of Communications. My domain is secure.

> You don’t own your website,

I very much do.

> you do own your Dwebsite.

Citation needed. Where are they actually hosted? How are they accessed? What mechanisms facilitate the existence of these "dwebsites" in the first place? Who's paying for the storage, bandwidth, and uptime?

>Plenty of service providers to choose from.

It's important to be very careful to avoid vendor lock in to keep the option to switch. Parler made that mistake and when Amazon dropped them they had a hard time moving. Providers are constantly trying to lock you in to their particular services.

A consequence of reliance on "cloud" services, exacerbated by tutorial glut and minimal service interoperability without fairly significant training/experience.

A traceroute to bitsofcode.eth.link shows it on Cloudflare. Why is this decentralized?

You are viewing it through a Cloudflare bridge, you can also reach it decentralized via the .eth without the .link if you are using an ENS+IPFS browser. Info here: https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-distributed-web-resol...

The links are for the Cloudflare gateway because most people don't have tools to show them.

If you're using brave, simply remove the ".link" ("bitsofcode.eth") and you'll see it directly.

There are also browser extensions: Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/esteroids/

Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/unstoppable-extens...

Where's the actual hosting? This is the naming system.

Can you host on, say, Ardrive and have it actually work?

You can supposedly buy perpetual storage on Ardrive for $5/GB.

Probably hosted on IPFS.

Can someone ELI5 how decentralized websites work and how much it costs or provide a link to some article?

Regular websites: DNS + server Decentralized websites: decentralized name service + decentralized storage.

How much it costs? Depends on how you "keep it alive" in the network. There always needs to be at least one person with a copy of the website. If it's you, it's for free - but you can pay a service.

Here's an introduction article: https://almonit.club/blog/2020-05-21/Introduction_to_Dwebsit...

I don't get the point of this. It's the exact same thing as a website, except it uses Ethereum Naming Service instead of DNS? And it uses IPFS storage instead of a regular web host or Digital Ocean droplet?

What do I, an average person, gain from simply shifting from one DNS-type service to another?

As for being censorship resistant, I'm not aware of Digital Ocean/Bluehost/GoDaddy deactivating a lot of sites for censortship reasons. Social networks sure, but web hosts?

One big problem with the current internet is that the DNS for the top level domains (like .com) is controlled by centralized entities, such as ICANN. This means that the entire internet can technically be taken offline very easily if ICANN was compromised.

The thing about censorship is that by the time you realize you need it, it might already be too late to do anything about it. That's why it's so important to establish censorship-resistant methods of communication BEFORE it is an issue.

> One big problem with the current internet is that the DNS for the top level domains (like .com) is controlled by centralized entities, such as ICANN.

The TLD here is .eth; who controls it. As far as I have understood, this service is selling kind of NFT. But the ultimate linkage with the real world is controlled by a single entity (company).

I don't get what is the benefit.

I really dislike Twitter content being shared on HN. There is not much information to get from 300 chars or less.

Instead, check out this link: http://blog.almonit.eth.link/2020-05-21/Introduction_to_Dweb...

Thanks for sharing this link! I actually wrote both this Twitter thread and the blog post you linked.

I shared the blog post in the past in Hackernews, but it didn't get much traction.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23259885

Ok, we've changed to that from https://twitter.com/e_steroids/status/1405914760017756164 above. Thanks!

Twitter content on HN is a mixed bag. A lot is bad but some is excellent and/or not available elsewhere.

How difficult is to make sci-hub decentralized

There's torrents of sci-hub so in a sense it already exists. However, making it as a decentralized site like those would be fairly expensive probably as it's likely close to 100TB in total by now.

You can literally get over 100TB of data for under $15/mo, so no it wouldn't be the expensive.

Where?

/dev/urandom

G Suite costs $12/mo and many users still get unlimited storage without needing 5 users . It can be mounted like a regular drive using rclone. Linus Tech Tips has an entire video about it and you'll find many people using it.

The entire scientific community would also be interested where to get this deal

Cheap reliable cloud storage seems to be roughly $5/(tb month), 100tb for 15 dollars sounds incredible, before counting bandwidth...

Unless you get unlimited storage with G Suite where there is no bandwidth costs. Also, FYI you can get 6TB storage with OneDrive for less than $5 per month through Costco. Both can be mounted and used like a regular drive with rclone.

You’ve posted the same comment about gsuite at least 5 times in this thread which is no longer an option.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/what-happens-to-your-g-suite-u...

https://9to5google.com/2020/10/08/google-workspace-drive-sto...

Because I was responding to multiple people. You are posting old articles. Why don't you try going to reddit or find new articles and you can see that it is still available.

Interest in this too. Where?

G Suite

Absolutely not. 100 TB of hard disks costs in the neighborhood of $1500 (using a low estimate of $240/16GB). Even if operating and maintaining the hardware cost nothing (which it doesn't) and redundancy was unnecessary (which most users would disagree with), paying that off at $15/mo would take over 8 years, which is beyond the expected lifespan of the hardware.

G Suite costs $12/mo and many users still get unlimited storage without needing 5 users . It can be mounted like a regular drive using rclone. So please don't tell me it is impossible when Linus Tech Tips has an entire video about it and you'll find many people using it.

So what do you do when Google enforce 1TB rule?

They have said they don't intend to. I have found an alternative if they get rid of it altogether though that I don't intend to disclose.

This package is no longer available for new users and it’s expected that google will start killing old accounts at some point. https://www.zdnet.com/article/what-happens-to-your-g-suite-u...

It is not expected Google will kill old accounts, in fact they have said they don't intend to. Regardless, you can still upgrade to an unlimited plan for pretty cheap. And alas I proved my point that yes it is possible.

Is this that non-redundant, cloud-connected tape drives as a service I'be been hearing so much about lately?

No, this is using G Suite with an rclone mount.

I'm not sure how Filecoin is connected to IPFS, but if it is, can it be done with it?

Another option is with Skynet (based on Sia)

Sia/Skynet has serious technical problems and does not appear to be viable for any use case:

https://siasetup.info/concerns-about-sia-and-skynet

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