from Hacker News

HTTP is obsolete – it's time for the distributed, permanent web (2015)

by Hakeemmidan on 10/17/21, 3:57 PM with 325 comments

by adfrhgeaq5hy on 10/17/21, 5:58 PM
IPFS needs to decide what it wants to be. Is it about being a decentralized caching layer? Is it about permanently storing content? Is it about replacing my web server? Is it about replacing DNS? Is it about censorship resistance?
Right now it does none of those things well. The client chews through CPU and memory when seemingly doing nothing. If I try to download content, it is far slower than BitTorrent unless I go through a centralized gateway. If I add content it takes ages to propagate, making it utterly unsuitable as a replacement for a web server. There is no system to keep content alive so links will still die. The name system is byzantine and I don't think anyone uses it.
Unfortunately, they are now unable to pivot because they did that asinine ICO. The right thing to do is to give up on the FileCoin nonsense and build a system that solves a problem better than anything else, but that is no longer allowed because they already sold something else to their "investors"
by jeroenhd on 10/17/21, 4:34 PM
I like IPFS, I really do, but whenever I try to use it, it's either too slow to become usable or sometimes it plain doesn't work. I pinned a whole bunch of files on IPFS a while back to experiment with it and the system seems to work, but every time I try to fetch those resources from a location that hasn't cached the content yet, it takes several seconds to show me the HTML/JSON/PNG files.
HTTP may be inefficient for document storage, but IPFS is inefficient for almost everything else.
I like the concepts behind IPFS but it's simply not practical to use the system in its current form. I hope my issues will get resolved at some point but I can't shake the thought that it'll die a silent death like so many attempts to replace the internet before it.
by v_london on 10/17/21, 9:04 PM
Pretty interesting. A lot of people here are focusing on permanence, but for me the main difference on addressing by content vs by host name is the loss of authorship it opens up for the web. Since a research paper of essay is referred to by its hash, the owner effectively gives away all control of the work when it's first published. There will be no editing, no taking down unwanted work, and no real way to build an interactive website that allows dynamic linking to other materials by the author.
It's interesting how the same people promoting the "creator economy" also tend to promote the cryptocurrency space and IPFS without an ounce of self-awareness. IPFS sounds awful for creators of all kinds in the same way as BitTorrent was awful for artists. I can definitely see a use case for IPFS as a file storage for trustless systems such as smart contracts, which are designed as immutable, trustless systems.
by CharlesW on 10/17/21, 4:59 PM
The author claims that IPFS enables a "permanent web" and eliminates 404-like experiences. How does IPFS guarantee that all published content will be available forever? (In my beginner-level knowledge of IPFS, this is the first I've heard that claim. It seems absurd.)
by dreyfan on 10/17/21, 5:40 PM
I'll just point to the millions of torrent files today that will remain unseeded forever. Durability with P2P only works as a complement to centralization.
by anaphor on 10/17/21, 4:40 PM
Named-data networking is literally what this is describing, except NDN works as a replacement for TCP, not HTTP. In the long term I'd rather have it work at a lower level and not have to think about it much. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqGEMQveoqg
by jmull on 10/17/21, 5:14 PM
I wonder how people are incentivized to host content well?
Whether HTTP or IPFS, you want content:
(1) hosted/stored redundantly enough for availability but not over-hosted/stored because that raises costs.
(2) hosted “near” to requesters to make efficient use of the network, which limits costs and increases speed. (Near in terms of the network infrastructure.)
With HTTP I understand how this works (the content publisher figures out a hosting solution balancing what they are willing/able to pay and what kind of availability and speed they want/need).
Not sure with IPFS though. If people are choosing what to host, wouldn’t the hosting be uneven, with some content under-hosted (or not hosted at all) and some popular content greatly over-hosted? …leading to an inefficient system? Under—hosted content would be slow to retrieve or simply unavailable. Over-hosted content is wasting resources, making the system more costly than it needs to be (somebody is paying for the storage and servers to make that storage available).
I realize this a alpha/experimental, but without a strong answer to this, I don’t see how the system can work at scale.
by neiman on 10/17/21, 10:59 PM
The "permanent web" goal didn't survive that well. I work closely with IPFS since 2018, and it's not part of the narative by now.
The distributed part is still going strong, but in my eyes distributed (or decentralization) should be a tool, not a goal.
The question is which kind of Internet we want to build with these distributed infrastructure? If it's just cloning the current Internet, then I don't see what it brings.
My personal answer is that we should build a democratic Internet. One where people are members of the Internet, instead of mere users, and decisions are made in a democratic process, like in a state. This kind of Internet can only be implemented using the distributed/decentralized tools.
by jimpick on 10/17/21, 8:45 PM
People hating on IPFS DHT performance probably aren’t using the experimental accelerated DHT client. https://github.com/ipfs/go-ipfs/blob/master/docs/experimenta...
by dleslie on 10/17/21, 4:38 PM
> All the static content stored with the site still loads, and my modern browser still renders the page (HTML, unlike HTTP, has excellent lasting power). But any links offsite or to dynamically served content are dead. For every weird example like this, there are countless examples of incredibly useful content that have also long since vanished.
Perhaps I missed it, but I don't see where they claim that IPFS can provide a solution for dynamic content; which makes up a huge portion of what is served over HTTP.
by mayli on 10/17/21, 7:55 PM
ironically, few links on this 2015 post are dead, and most of them being ipfs releated.
https://ipfs.io/ipns/QmTodvhq9CUS9hH8rirt4YmihxJKZ5tYez8PtDm... https://ipfs.io/ipns/ipfs.git.sexy/
by ptaq on 10/17/21, 8:38 PM
Economy of scale is hard to combat with a technically decentralized protocol.
Let's assume all goes well and in 2-5-20 years IPFS is the web. A random Joe has an IPFS server in his basement, because it's profitable or at least convenient for him. Most of the traffic never reaches AWS or CouldFlare. What do they do about it? They pretend to be random Joes and mirror the same setup.
Obviously Amazon will manage their servers more efficiently than an army of Joes, so the nothing really changes: we end up with a decentralized protocol where 90% of traffic just happens to end up on AWS servers anyway.
by syngrog66 on 10/17/21, 5:08 PM
I love the idea of IPFS but the last 2 times I tried using it, it simply didnt work. There was no "there" there. The simplest use cases like "I want file X from the ether, make it happen" like you could do with torrents -- nothing ever happened.
I read the docs and tutorials but no luck. Felt like docs were missing some special incantation or setup step, or precondition. Or the CLI wasnt giving me feedback on some blocking error, and it was failing silently. Dunno. Gave up. Hope to revisit some day. Because in theory it would be useful tech to have in my toolbox.
by doliveira on 10/17/21, 5:27 PM
On a side note, do you all know about some research or PoC in the direction of a globally distributed knowledge graph or something of sorts? Or at least a more technical name I could google.
I think it's so bad that so much of the Internet information is siloed in walled gardens and that pages have to be dynamically generated and routed across the globe every single time... Imagine how it's gonna be when we get to Mars, for instance. Storing this knowledge graph in IPFS files seems like a logical step to me (as an absolute layman, though)
by goodmachine on 10/17/21, 7:17 PM
Peergos is an interesting human-friendly project built on top of IPFS. Works great so far.
Of interest: they provide a trustless way to store your data encrypted data on centralised boxes (S3, Backblaze) if you want.
https://peergos.org/
by mwfunk on 10/17/21, 6:43 PM
You don't search for locations with HTTP, any more than a shipping company searches for addresses to deliver to. The problem with bad metaphors is it derails discussion, which I am arguably doing with this comment.
by simonebrunozzi on 10/17/21, 7:18 PM
The analogy is just plain wrong.
search for content = it presumes that there's a google-like indexing of content, and then a DNS-like way to retrieve it.
It seems to me that IPFS, in this analogy, is simply a different way to address a web page / document.
note: I am very familiar with IPFS. I just think that this analogy is really poor.
by captainbland on 10/18/21, 1:31 PM
I did like the concept of IPFS around the time this was written but now it feels to me like it misses the wood for the trees.
The thing is that the web by its nature is already decentralised. The real issue with the web today isn't really some technical, architectural flaw.
Centralisation has emerged in this already reasonably well decentralised system because of network effect driven accumulation, the market and pre-existing wealth from investors tipping the scales.
Yes IPFS is a more thorough attempt to create a distributed web, yet I doubt it is fully immune to the forces that captured and centralised the existing web, except for the fact that it is currently unpopular. Or it will remain unpopular because there's no incentive for private enterprises to invest much in a system where they can't control their own corner of it and few users like using systems built on the cheap when flashy, well funded alternatives exist, if it is truly that resilient to centralisation. Whichever way you want to slice it.
The social forces that cause centralisation in the web are the same forces that cause e.g. monopoly and extreme wealth accrual in the rest of society. And the fix has to be social, not technical.
by topynate on 10/17/21, 8:29 PM
I like IPFS for making Libgen faster (with a little help from Cloudflare). If it also manages to solve hard problems of decentralization and content-addressable storage, that's just a bonus.
by anaganisk on 10/18/21, 6:18 AM
As long as there are no actual, native iOS, android and PC Apps built on top of IPFS or even an access GUI or interface with browser on those platforms, IPFS can stop dreaming of replacing HTTP. Apart from mere 1-2% of world population who use internet, no one else is going to download a binary and run a CLI, and visit 127.0.0.1:8080/ipfs. For majority of people chrome is a gateway to internet (for them Http is a prefix u put in-front of a url) unless ipfs goes to that level, http is as relevant as ever. I know software devs who don’t know they could access files from browser via file:// protocol.
by st_goliath on 10/18/21, 7:01 AM
I wonder if the author of this ever heard about Project Xanadu: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu
The idea on how a decentralized web of hypertext documents should be done right isn't exactly new. AFAIK the fact that in the HTTP+HTML web stack, servers going down meant documents disappearing and links going stale was criticized even at the time. The HTTP+HTML stack winning out is probably one of the many examples of "good enough" winning over "perfect".
by enz on 10/17/21, 3:59 PM
> “With HTTP, you search for locations. With IPFS, you search for content.”
Well, that's the difference between an URL and an URI, right? HTTP seems URL-oriented while IPFS seems URI-oriented.
by austincheney on 10/18/21, 11:38 AM
As an outsider looking in IPFS will struggle to catch on with non technical people, like Tor. It can be the best thing ever for privacy, access, or whatever. It still won’t catch on. This is the Linux problem as explained by Torvald.
The problem is that it isn’t unique enough from the existing experience and the problems it claims to solve aren’t something non technical people care about. Web distribution in its current form works. Even if it’s supremely shitty grandma can still post photos on Facebook.
If a new distribution format wants to win it needs to be different in a way an 8 year old and grandma can equally understand. IPFS is not that. What 8 year olds and grandma equally understand is that content is king, the layman term for client/server model.
More likely the future will purely be a focus on web technologies for application experiences and distribution. Kill the client/server model. If grandma wants to share photos with grandkids she doesn’t need Facebook at all. She only needs a network, a silent distribution/security model, and the right application interface. No server, no cloud, no third party required.
by bborud on 10/18/21, 11:23 AM
This is very badly written and I think the author might benefit from rewriting this.
Start with a description of the solution. If you can't cover it in 1-2 paragraphs at the beginning, you are in trouble. Don't focus so much on what everyone else is doing wrong - focus on what you are doing and let others be the judge of whether this is better.
by dpweb on 10/17/21, 5:21 PM
I like the concept of immutable content, but HTTP eliminated top down control of information?
Well, we’re all dependent on the Internet which can be shut down at any time by any government, and normally almost completely dependent on FAANG companies.
I applaud the freedom activist spirit but the only exciting technologies in this regard must be P2P and not Internet carried.
by supperburg on 10/17/21, 6:41 PM
Just create an easy way to host stuff. Support a cultural shift toward dithered images and a universal text format. Make hiring a host cheap and easy and make hosting locally easy. Small sizes makes backing up easier and cheaper. Create a service where people can store a shard of the backup of the new internet and in return have their content added to the collective backup. I really think it’s about a cultural shift more than anything. Because without a collective realization that bandwidth and file sizes need to be reigned in, the content on the internet will just live at the perpetually ascending ceiling of what the internet can handle. And in that situation there will never be a way to make the internet a robust, equitable and interesting place.
by Datsundere on 10/17/21, 11:17 PM
This has been bothering for the longest time. I would love to learn more about efforts that are being taken to avoid these workarounds we have for certs expiring, dns issues and such.
A lot of website hacking could've been avoided with a better design like even having encryption as standard.
by drdeca on 10/17/21, 11:42 PM
What I would like, I think, is the ability to specify both the multihash and a place to request the data from.
Like, if I’m talking to someone over some chat setup which doesn’t have a built in “send this file directly to this person” feature, it would be nice to be able to say, give them a multihash of the file and my external ipv6 address (+ port? I’m not quite sure how routing works), and have them request the file from my computer.
Now, you might say “but how does that help with the situation where a bunch of people in a room want the same file from a distant location?”.
And, maybe it doesn’t as much? But I think if e.g. people on a local network had theirs try first if the local network already had it, and then check the given external address, that that could work?
by 0xtr on 10/17/21, 6:31 PM
I really like IPFS but their standard desktop client sucks big time. I've had a lot of performance problems where it freezes whenever I click a tab or even doesn't go to the tab I click on. It makes the whole experience a lot worse than it needs to.
by holoduke on 10/18/21, 2:02 PM
What is ipfs really trying to solve. They artificially came up with some issues they think are annoying with HTTP. But is the rest of world thinking the same? I don't think so. Nothing wrong with current situation.
by Flocular on 10/17/21, 8:09 PM
It sounds like freenet to me. How will this allow for governments to censor CSAM?
by Const-me on 10/18/21, 4:48 AM
The main performance challenge is hardware not software, it's power management on mobile devices. After a new iPhone will be able to work for a few days on battery, while constantly transmitting data at 10-100 megabits/second, P2P will be good again.
Before iPhone, peer 2 peer tech were doing OK. Then mobile broadband came, and centralized services basically won.
Now we (at least in some places) have mobile broadband of symmetrical 50-100 mbit/sec, yet p2p still doesn't work on mobile. Despite the bandwidth is now good, electricity and thermals still aren't.
by Zababa on 10/17/21, 5:22 PM
So IPFS is basically some kind of automatic behind-the-scene torrenting? I see how that solves the "dead server" problem, but how does that solves the "content longevity" problem?
by badrabbit on 10/17/21, 9:03 PM
How do you manage access control with IPFS? Just because someone knows a hash does not mean they are allowed to access the content.
EDIT: It seems [1] they want you to encrypt content and do access control outside of ipfs. Imagine ext4 telling you to do acl's on your own. To me, it is a little more than bittorrent without acls and at-rest confidentiality built-in.
[1] https://github.com/ipfs/notes/issues/376
by Ericson2314 on 10/17/21, 4:58 PM
I like to explain it by comparing Amazon warehouses to the post office.
Post office send black-box data point to to point. Amazon gets you thinggy matching SKU from arbitrary location.
by ultra_nick on 10/18/21, 3:37 PM
It's crazy how many people don't get the IPFS/Dweb.
It's like the invention of personal computers. It's going to change everything like the shift from time share department computers did. Imagine what programmers could do if YouTube size infrastructure was free for every developer. IPFS is just the boring protocol the enables the next internet of stuff. The stuff that comes out in the next 20 years will be crazy.
by alfl on 10/17/21, 10:55 PM
In “The Innovator’s Dilemma” Christiansen presents data from the storage market supporting the argument that disruptive innovations happen when inventions outcompete incumbent products on value criteria that appeal to engineers and enthusiasts but that don’t have immediate commercial applications.
I think that’s what happening in the storage market, again, with IPFS.
by pdimitar on 10/17/21, 11:43 PM
Not on a network that can easily and quickly blacklist hashes sent to them to the authorities.
(Sadly I don't keep the links anymore to prove it. It was somewhere in one of their GitHub repos however, inside an issue.)
I'd love to support them but they don't stand behind their "uncensorable" original slogan.
by shp0ngle on 10/18/21, 3:38 AM
Anyone has any experience with the FileCoin thing?
If I want to “save” some data in FileCoin/IPFS/whatever, and I want it there forever, is it cheap? Expensive? Can I be reasonably sure it stays there?
I want some actual current results, not “one day in the future”, heard that too much from *Coin proponents
by worldmerge on 10/17/21, 4:53 PM
This is very cool! Also should be noted this is from 2015, would love to hear a follow up to this.
by jl6 on 10/18/21, 6:58 AM
Is there an IPFS server that can run within a fixed memory budget? Last time I tried the Go implementation, its memory usage increased steadily over the course of 72 hours and then got killed when it approached a gigabyte (which was all the VM’s memory).
by dang on 10/17/21, 10:13 PM
Discussed at the time:
Neocities is implementing IPFS – distributed, permanent web - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10187555 - Sept 2015 (235 comments)
by ftyers on 10/18/21, 4:49 AM
There is still only one implementation of the protocol and no fully functioning Python API. (Disclaimer: I love IPFS, but until it has better support for programmers who don't want to use Go, it's unlikely to get much traction).
by bullen on 10/18/21, 7:38 AM
I have a slight issue with the title, why not IPFS over HTTP? Why are all these entites (both corporate and not) trying to deprecate the main protocol used by humans?
HTTP is simple and works, what ever you do build on top of HTTP instead of TCP/UDP.
by NewEntryHN on 10/17/21, 9:28 PM
HTTP is an application protocol and most of this article doesn't make any sense.
by d--b on 10/17/21, 6:30 PM
> it efficiently (20 hops for a network of 10,000,000) finds the nodes that have the data using a Distributed Hash Table
See this is the part I always doubted. I haven’t done the math, but does it really scale up to the size of the internet?
by TeeMassive on 10/17/21, 4:58 PM
Ok cool, I love decentralized content distribution frameworks too. But what do I have to install to use it? As with most of these attempts to decentralization, it fails because of the mostly absent effort spent on ease of use.
by userbinator on 10/17/21, 11:27 PM
I see no mention in the comments so far of eMule/ed2k, Winny, Share, etc. --- all the other P2P systems that came before torrents became dominant. This doesn't seem particularly different from those.
by jayd16 on 10/17/21, 9:53 PM
Does IPFS have an append only primitive? Something like the signed owner can add to an existing document? Is that built in or something you'd have to handle in the application layer?
by dools on 10/17/21, 10:47 PM
“ As a result of liquifying information and making it the publication of it more egalitarian and accessible, HTTP has made almost everything about our culture better.”
That didn’t age well …
by k__ on 10/18/21, 11:29 AM
Interesting things happening in that space.
Arweave seems to be another approach to the problem.
https://www.arweave.org/
by jokoon on 10/18/21, 11:39 AM
I would gladly see a client that lets users allocate between 50 to 200MB of storage to host other websites. It could run on phones and would allow redundancy.
by unnouinceput on 10/17/21, 5:23 PM
So, they reinvented torrents? Or old timers, do you remember the peer-to-peer connection from 90's called DC++ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DC%2B%2B)?
Like this IPFS, you'd connect to a hub (IPFS calls this a node) and get what people were sharing. This IPFS only takes that step a little further with hashing and distributing. Also, if this gets implemented widely, hash collision is going to be wild
by democracy on 10/17/21, 10:08 PM
Oh it's one of the "cryptocurrency" solution looking for a problem to solve? Thanks, no, thanks! :)
by FalconSensei on 10/18/21, 1:18 AM
> IPFS is actually more similar to a single bittorrent swarm exchanging git objects
So definitely not permanent, right?
by yewenjie on 10/17/21, 6:58 PM
What is one cool use-case/ semi-killer app for IPFS go get started with?
by sergiotapia on 10/17/21, 4:51 PM
Is there a way to install something on my local machine and host IPFS content to help "the swarm". If they combine this with some kind of crypto monetary incentive it would go a long way for people to help "the swarm".
Odysee is looking into adding crypto to your balance when you serve content that helps viewers.
by f7ebc20c97 on 10/17/21, 10:51 PM
What's difference between IPFS and Oxen??
by carapace on 10/17/21, 4:52 PM
(2015)