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Comment by psKama | Hacker News Reader

Smart contracts + decentralized storage is a great idea but since the beginning to this date, IPFS has been totally unreliable/unstable for me. Whenever I try to load a web page hosted on IPFS or whatever app which uses IPFS as backend (e.g. audios), 80% chance it simply doesn't load. I just hope this update addresses stability issues as well as introducing smart contracts.

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One of the things we're well aware of is the huge opportunity/need for better gateways. What you're seeing is actually the gateway failing (not IPFS) so _technically_ ipfs is doing fine. NOT THAT THAT MATTERS IF YOU'RE JUST TRYING TO LOAD A WEB PAGE - WE KNOW! WE PROMISE! :)

Lots of folks are working on retrievability even as we speak (https://retrieval.market/). Stay tuned!

BTW, if you ever want your content directly, you can go here - https://ipfs.io/ipfs/<CID>. Brave also offers IPFS native integration not via gateways. Again, we are well aware this isn't enough! Coming soon...

Disclosure: I am co-director of Research Development at Protocol Labs.

Using a local IPFS node doesn't usually work much better. Or at least it hasn't for me. Been a little while since I deleted IPFS desktop since I wasn't using it enough to justify its resource usage.

I would reccomend just using go-ipfs with the browser addon.

Asking as product enthusiast,I have seen the development of Filecoin over the years.

What are some great usecases for filecoin at the current state?

I've the same experience roughly. The one recent happy finding I found though is that using the 'ipfs.io' link on library genesis is generally much faster (and as reliable) than the other mirror links. Kinda gave me hope that there's something to the ipfs idea after all.

Have you always tried to run it on the same network? Might be something in your setup. I agree that it can sometimes be flaky, but usually adjusting the settings for the daemon solves the issue for me, either it's connected to too many peers (basically saturating all my available bandwidth) or too few.

Looking around, some projects (like https://estuary.tech/) seems to have successfully stored around ~160 TiB of data on Filecoin (via IPFS), so there are setups where it does work successfully.

I've stored over 1PB to dev/null over the year's. Retrieval is the real problem :p

I guess we have wildly different expectations of what "stored" means :)

The infinite compression ratio is unbeatable.

The Pinata paid account gateway has worked pretty well for me. The $1000/mo for 100k pins screwed me though. But I may keep an account for the gateway since I am under 100k now.

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