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  • Hacker News
  • I hope this doesn't signal the decline of ipfs overall. I really would like to see an internet where content addressed routing is a thing.
    by jackinloadup
  • IPFS never worked right for many years. Great concept, poor implementation. Someone will one day build something that incorporates these ideas.
    by sneak
  • They did - Bittorrent
    by inigyou
  • I'm currently on sabbatical looking for volunteer work. I always thought IPFS was an interesting project, might be happy to pitch in some of my now-free bandwidth.
    by mmastrac
  • I don't think the problem was a lack of effort. The tech was interesting and innovative but the foundation of it had limits that were extremely hard to work past. As a technology it laid a lot of groundwork for better ideas, but I doubt it's worth investing in.
    by bastawhiz
  • A few interesting places to get involved:

    - ATProto ecosystem (built on IPFS content addressing, used by Bluesky): https://atproto.com/guides/tutorials

    - IPFS contribution guide: https://docs.ipfs.tech/community/contribute/contribution-tut...

    - libp2p maintainers call (networking layer of IPFS & other p2p networks): https://libp2p.io/get-involved/

    by momack2
  • Does IPFS actually have users? I remeber when they raised 270 million and a bunch of people there got wildly wealthy
    by mikert89
  • Wait are you telling me yet another supposedly ground breaking technology turned out to be yet another grift.

    I know a lot of people on HN are going to call me overly cynical. But this pattern should be so obvious by now. Any cynicism to any new ground breaking technology which is gonna solve a problem that exists because of capitalism, that this cynicism is more than warranted.

    At this point we should all be cynical of any new technology.

    by runarberg
  • Most of the generative art is hosted on IPFS.
    by airspresso
  • I guess IPFS is an artifact from the crypto craze. It's pretty silly if you think of it. However, I must admit, I got my first ever developer grant from Filecoin while they were flush with ZIRP era money.

    btw,I thought it was an Initial Coin Offering, not an actual fundraise.

    by muragekibicho
  • I run a company currently serving ~1.7B requests per day (~20k/s) to ipfs gateways, so presumably still some. Very likely a big chunk of that is bots scraping stuff.
    by devttyeu
  • You can see public network metrics here: https://probelab.io/ipfs/

    About 800k unique DHT clients are seen weekly.

    by 2color
  • The only place where I regularly stumble upon on it was/is on libgen.
    by dewey
  • I can not say IPFS was a bad idea. Consider GitHub: it is a massive content-addressed store with a smiley on it. There has been some very hot P2P products, e.g. Tailscale. Protocol Labs had its peak during/after the ICO, but long-term, (1) they did not focus on some particular audience and (2) performance of the network was not great. I personally believe that their bet on DHT was not the right one (I worked in this area long before IPFS btw). OK, in retrospect we are all wise.
    by gritzko
  • I worked on their DHT and it was broken from the start, and they didn't want to hear how to fix it. What would I know.
    by anacrolix
  • I publish all of my music in ways that are pirate-friendly, which for the moment just means Bit Torrent and IPFS.

    See: https://pickipedia.xyz/wiki/Cryptograss:Delivery-kid

    If IPFS is starting to wane, does anyone else have a suggestion of a replacement about which I might start to educate my fans?

    by jMyles
  • also still getting used in some libgen sci-hub mirrors
    by scirob
  • Hyphanet (nee Freenet)
    by TiredOfLife
  • See I thought if IPFS was picked up by the piracy scene (some bigger private trackers for example) then it probably would have been more successful. Alas I haven't seen it outside of libgen and even there I thought it was a backup option only.
    by haunter
  • Kubo, Helia, Boxo, Rainbow, IPFS Desktop, IPFS Companion, Someguy, Service Worker Gateway, IPFS Check, libp2p, ipfs.io, dweb.link, check.ipfs.network, delegated-ipfs.dev, Wikipedia-on-IPFS.

    It kinda feels like the AWS or Azure of file distribution, so much stuff so confusing. Also apparently with Protocol Labs owning several of those things despite not operating those things?

    Ironically seems quite a fragile setup.

    Regardless, very sad news.

    by its-summertime
  • I tried to build a few non crypto decentralized apps. The killer was reliable always deliverability inside the browser. https://inbrowser.link/ was a huge jump in utility but came to late the ipfs.js just never worked consistently. In the end the only way to get good XP for yours users was that you provider the IPFS to http gateway for all content but then whats the point its just decentralization theater.

    I remember in 2015 having the IPFS concept blow my mind its such a memorable moment when it really felt like someone designed something significantly different that current mainstream paradigms. But in the end it seems like it was still a case of a cool technology looking for a use-case not solving a real problem.

    by scirob
  • Agreed. I was deep in the ecosystem, did the confs, shipped some apps. It’s hard to think of a use case that would be reliable now. Maybe some kinda file sync that is torrent like but http
    by tetrisgm
  • > In the end the only way to get good XP for yours users was that you provider the IPFS to http gateway for all content but then whats the point its just decentralization theater.

    I gave my static photo album website image files paths that consisted of /ipfs/ as directory name and ipfs hash as file name.

    Brave browser was able to figure out that this meant they were available on IPFS, and asked me if i wanted to load the files from IPFS instead of from the web server itself.

    So over time if hosting files on IPFS got popular, it could have been used automatically by browsers later to load the files from IPFS instead of the web server of the site. Saving bandwidth for the website operators and distributing storage of content which might also help it remain available for longer time.

    That sort of thing would have been one great outcome, for example, where this sort of hosting your own http gateway for your own IPFS files makes sense like I was doing. Mind you, the web server setup for this was completely straightforward and requires no running of the IPFS services on the web server itself. On the web server it really was plain old directories and file names. As long as they are real IPFS hashes. And calculating the IPFS hash itself I did on my laptop when adding photos.

    Very sad to hear in this thread that Brave browser has actually removed IPFS support :(

    by QuantumNomad_
  • > If you have a favourite memory of working with Shipyard, or an idea you always hoped IPFS would eventually achieve, we’d love to hear it. Google Form

    One important thing I'd like to see IPFS or a similar decentralized web technology achieve, is getting rid of the necessity of filling out a Google form in order to tell the Shipyard people what I think about their maintenance of IPFS.

    Seriously it bugs me when people who ostensibly care about decentralized or privacy technology use a centralized service hosted by a gigantic tech company to accomplish a task because it's convenient (if you already have an account with them), and don't even try to make a decentralized version available. It would have been better if they simply invited people to send them an email.

    by JuniperMesos
  • Imagine if all the energy spent whining on the purity of a system being insufficiently private or decentralized or somehow loyal to a fight against the man, was spent instead on actually improving those systems. They're open source.
    by lallysingh
  • Dude they just got shut down and will need to look for new jobs, cut them a tiny bit of slack.
    by zeafoamrun
  • This is honestly just the nitpickiest complaint of all. Criticizing people who just found out they're losing their jobs for which solution they use to collect fond memories from their users is an outrageous thing to get upset over. Just don't fill out the form.
    by bastawhiz
  • I wonder what distinguishes these kinds of communities over others. Some, like 'decentralization' or 'privacy' or 'security', require absolute adherence. If you're building a decentralized tool or a privacy tool or a security tool you must first reinvent the universe. Post on HN? Centralized, privacy nightmare, insecure. Use Gmail as your email provider? Centralized, privacy nightmare, insecure. Fastmail? Centralized. Run your own mail provider? Cool, on a cloud? Centralized, privacy nightmare. On your own infra? Centralized, bus factor 1.

    Sort of an interesting market signal. "Don't bother building for me unless you're absolutely pure". Funny stuff.

    by arjie
  • This is really unfortunate. When cloudflare dropped IPFS you could say this next step was sort of already on the way. I may be biased but I think when IPFS decided to put so much time into "IPNS" in order to support non-static webapps years ago what they came up with did not fit the need. And without webapps on IPFS things were going nowhere.

    A year or so ago I wrote IPFS-boot which allows serving webapps on IPFS while providing also an update path and without breaking content hashing:

    https://github.com/rhodey/IPFS-boot

    But now if you want to serve a secure webapp and not use IPFS IMO the only option you have is to tell users to install Tailscale and to host the webapp themselves and then to install Tailscale on all devices.

    by rhodey
  • Why do you need Tailscale?

    Edit: Okay, so a couple of people have downvoted but no-one has answered.

    Why would you use tailscale to secure a web app?

    by ErroneousBosh