I moved my blog from IPFS to a server

I mean it's not like HTTP where all URLs are tied to a particular webserver and can even be changed on that server. If someone different starts seeding, you'll get the same data again at the same URL, with built-in checksumming.

I'm sure a BitTorrent gateway can exist, but I'm wondering why it doesn't seem to "be a thing." I've never seen one used, nor do I see an obvious public one when searching. Whereas IPFS gateways are so mainstream that even Cloudflare runs a public one.

> True P2P networks don't scale, because every node has to store an (accurate if partial) representation of the whole network

Former LimeWire dev here... which P2P networks use a fully meshed topology? LimeWire and other Gnutella clients just have a random mesh with a fixed number of (ultra)peers. If the network gets too large, then your constrained broadcast queries hit their hop count before reaching the edge of the network, but that seems fine.

Last I checked, Freenet used a variation on a random mesh.

Kademlia's routing tables take O(log(N)) space and traffic per-peer to maintain (so O(N log(N)) for global total network space and traffic). Same for Chord (though, twice as much traffic due to not using a symmetric distance metric like XOR).

There are plenty of "True" (non-centralized) P2P networks that aren't fully meshed.

I think you and I would have a very interesting conversation.

I agree with a lot of your points, but not your conclusions.

> We always need some form of collective control over what's going on. We need moderation tools

I agree with this, and also think it is possible in peer-to-peer systems. Ideally the collective is self-governed. Particularly, when it comes to moderation, the closer the moderation controls are to being under the control of the user consuming the content, the more just the system.

> , we need to me able to make errors and fix them, etc.

Yes, 100%. Equity < Cryptography. It's far more important that your equity be rock solid than it is for your cryptography to be rock solid. If someone steals your property in a cryptographically sound way, equity should always trump cryptography. It's far more important that you have the title to your vehicle than it is that you have the keys to your vehicle.

I feel like many p2p systems have gotten this one backwards.

> There are middle grounds: federated systems for example, like Mastodon or emails, actually work.

I consider these centralized systems, just N copies of the same problem. I don't feel like the power imbalance between the users and the system administrators are addressed in a sufficient way on the fediverse as it is currently implemented.

These systems have a classist, hierarchical, system where system administrators belong to a privileged class while users are second class citizens on the web.

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I feel one of the issues in the current centralized architectures is equity. When you go about moving through the world, you generate a large volume of valuable property (your data). But, today, you give away nearly all equity in that data. Centralized providers accumulate equity in their user's data, and that equity is how they pay the bills.

I do believe that, in a very meaningful way, equity and privacy are nearly synonymous when it comes to corporations respecting the privacy of their users. Just because Netflix delivers a video to your smartphone doesn't mean you can turn around and sell that video to your friend. You have been granted access to the video, but it is not your property. The inverse needs to be true too. Just because you share your viewing habits with Netflix doesn't mean they can sell that data to Warner Brothers, that's not their property (I mean, today it is, but it shouldn't be). If users had equity in their data, the data broker market as it exists today would be piracy.

P2P systems have failed to create a world where humans, their content, and their devices are meaningfully addressable for the web in a way that expresses equity as a first class citizen.

A decentralized world is possible, it's just not possible on the internet. The internet, as it exists, is insufficient for expressing the concepts of the modern web in a way that is possible without centralized servers.

We don't need web3, we need internet2.

> That is not to say that all p2p software is bad, especially since we call p2p a lot of things that are not entirely p2p. For example, BitTorrent is a p2p software, but its actual usage by humans relies on multiple more-or-less centralized point, trackers and torrent search engine.

libp2p and scuttlebutt are pretty cool too. Both with their problems, but those problems seems solvable. Both seem more like internet2 than web3.

p2p needs a new overlay network on top of the internet, just like the internet started as an overlay network on top of the telephony system.

"varying" is a pretty wide range here. If you mean "trust" as in trust to maintain connectivity, yes, but beyond that there are established ways to create secure channels over untrusted networks. Could you provide specifics about what you mean if anything beyond basic connectivity?

>Anything over the internet needs to pass through routers and poof decentralization's gone

That's not true. Yes the strict p2p connection is gone but decentralization is what the name says, a network of connections without a single center. The internet and it's routing systems are decentralized. Of course every decentralized system can also be stressed to a point of failure and not every node is automatically trustworthy.

And if you want a long incomprehensible string we already have that .onion sites work without a blockchain, too.

ENS (which is what the GP refers to) has human readable names. But it doesn't have support for A/AAAA records today (does anyone know why? A-record support was in the original spec). Aside from that the only reason you wouldn't be able to type "mycoolsite.eth" into your browsers URL bar and have it resolve to an IP is because no browser has an ENS resolver built in. Yet.

Namecoin has existed for a long time. It acts just like a traditional domain registar. First person to register a name gets it, and they have to pay a maintenance fee to keep it. Don't pay the maintenance fee and then someone else can register the name.

Downvotes, nice. Whatever helps you sleep at night.

> Either way you need to have a kind of central authority, or at least trusted third parties.

You lost me here. Couldn't the local user ('s process) reference the same block chain instead of another trusted party?

> Either way you need to have a kind of central authority, or at least trusted third parties.

Not everyone needs to run a node, and not everyone could, but it is totally feasible for an individual to run their own if they decide they can't trust anyone else for whatever reason. Especially if you were running a node specifically for the purpose of name resolution you could discard the vast, vast majority of data on the Ethereum blockchain (for example).

> what if someone gets a name and we as a society (i.e., justice, whatever) decides that they should not be in control of it? [...] and that's a problem.

No, that is a feature of a decentralized system. Individual node operators would be able to decide whether or not to serve particular records, but censorship resistance is one of the core features of blockchains in the first place.

> What if a private key is lost, the associated names are gone forever?

The association wouldn't be gone, it would just be unchangeable until it eventually expires. This is a known tradeoff if you are choosing ENS over traditional domain name registration.

> What if your private key is leaked by mistake and someone hostile take control of your name?

As opposed to today where someone hostile, like for instance the Afghani government (The Taliban), can seize your domain for any reason or no reason at all?

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I think we just have a fundamental disagreement about what types of features and use cases a name resolution system should have. That's completely fine, you're entitled to your own believes. You can use the system that most closely resembles your beliefs, and I'll use the one that most closely resembles mine. Fortunately for us different name resolution system can peacefully coexist due to the nature of name mappings. At least for now, none that I know of collide in namespace.

>There is more: what if someone gets a name and we as a society (i.e., justice, whatever) decides that they should not be in control of it?[...]or we can't, and that's a problem

That's a feature.

This is half the reason why P2P died in the late 2000s. Mobile clients need to leech off a server to function.

The other reason why it died is privacy. Participating in a P2P network reveals your IP address, which can be used to get a subscriber address via DMCA subpoenas, which is how the RIAA, MPAA, and later Prenda Law attacked the shit out of Gnutella and BitTorrent. Centralized systems don't usually expose their users to legal risk like P2P does.

I have to wonder: how does IPFS protect people from learning what websites I've been on, or have pinned, without compromising the security of the network?

https://codeberg.page .. similar idea to Github Pages.

1. to give a chance to avoid being slashdotted. 2. to allow anybody who finds it valuable to archive it, or parts of it?

The complexity of IPFS is another thing, which should be solved. However popular or unpopular your site might be, you must host is somewhere somehow, if you wish to be sure it sticks around. It is simple as that.

It helps to use more specific terms than "decentralized" and "censorship resilient", there are a lot of attack vectors for both. IPFS certainly does address some of the attack vectors, but not all. For example if the "centralized" thing you're worried about is DNS and certificate authorities, then you can avoid those authorities entirely with IPFS. Replication is one aspect of centralization, and IPFS doesn't completely fail at it, it's just more expensive (you can guarantee two node replication, you will have to run two nodes though). And there are other aspects not addressed by IPFS at all like its reliance on IP address routing infrastructure.

Yes, that is the state of affairs now. I can use cloudfront for my site, but cannot use it to pin my ipfs site (should I have one) as far as I know.

You are fighting a strawman. If you don't take of your site, but expect others to take care of it (pin it), then it is not your site. You must ensure it has at least one pinned version. Others might o might not pin it, it depends on the popularity, or the accessibility of the stack, which is lacking right now according to the article.

You still have to transfer that data through the network pipe to the end user no? How the server itself accesses the files to do so seems irrelevant to me.

oh shit, I replied to the wrong comment.

But it seems associated with blockchain and something named filecoin?

There goes all credibility.