Seems quite promising! I heard it could use more maturing.
I tried it out a while back but wasn’t too impressed, it still has a ways to go. During testing what I did was write a script to pin (aka “seed”) any public torrent downloaded in qBittorrent into IPFS. My goal was to see if anyone ever found/downloaded my pinned content via the available IPFS search engines.
But the reality is that the available IPFS search engines were crap, they sound nice in theory but are so bad at finding/indexing anything. It was rare that anything I had pinned in IPFS would show up in a search engine let alone someone find it & attempt to download it themselves. There’s still a lot of work to do.
The IPFS software itself also had a lot of performance/memory leak issues, I never could get it to run long term before it crashed & I’d have to figure out how to restart it or wipe its data & start over.
The other issue is that the IPFS project sort of feels like it’s treading water. The IPFS devs went on to create Filecoin & seem more focused on that nowadays. Think of Filecoin as IPFS + cryptocurrency, so you have the privilege to pay people to pin/host (“seed”) your data. And to top it off the Filecoin version of the IPFS network is incompatible with original IPFS network. Funny since it’s the same devs but also is a bit illuminating that they purposely designed it that way.
I’m currently building a peer-to-peer search engine for it. I will be uncensorable and private, as all things should be. We have seen nothing of what can be done on IPFS yet
Just needs an anonymisation layer by the sounds, like dandelion for monero
Besides being overhyped basic tech where way more useful and practical solutions existed for decades (Freenet existed since year 2000 btw, and Tahoe-LAFS since 2007), there is nothing private about IPFS. This is a dangerous message to purport.
IPFS is as practically useful as NFTs. No wonder the two crowds connected well!
iroh is an attempt to create a useful and practical IPFS. But none of the bigger practical features is implemented yet. And the design itself doesn’t appear to be finalized. I’m willing to give iroh a chance, although the close proximity to the IPFS crowd doesn’t fill one with confidence.
You are right, notice the use of future when I talk about privacy. What’s great with IPFS is that it’s based on libp2p. Libp2p makes it easy to add support for any transport protocol you like. If your transport protocol is private (tor, i2p…), then the whole protocol on top of it (ipfs, my search engine) is private. I’m pretty sure it was a choice for them to refuse adding support for private transports, because they don’t want illegal activity on ipfs, thinking it’s too early. But it’s inevitable in the long run
There is no need to talk about an imaginary version of IPFS. GNUnet already exists. You can add that to the list of actually superior technologies that long predates IPFS.
As I mentioned, IPFS is nothing but very basic tech that got overhyped to junior/uninformed developers, and crypto scam victims.
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As a user, I don’t want to share my downloaded images if people can use that to datamine my Lemmy browsing, so I wouldn’t use it.
Yes, instances could do the bulk of the sharing, but then that’s just downloading and rehosting images with extra steps.
Something like Veilid would be more interesting.
It’s in a wierd place where unless you can guarantee that other people will be hosting your content, it’s worse than a direct download server. I’m in the process of building a system similar to torrent private trackers where you have to seed to learn CIDs of the content you want (yes, if you know them already I can’t stop you, I know.) And that helps distribute the load. We’ll see how it goes.
I feel like some of the major scaling issues that lemmy has right now might be aided with IPFS in some capacity
