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
Good for you but what about the search engine?
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
iroha 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
I feel like some of the major scaling issues that lemmy has right now might be aided with IPFS in some capacity
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've messed with it in the past, found it interesting but too complicated and slow. Not sure if it has any future whatsoever other than as a curiosity.
The concept to distribute files is nice on paper, but in practice it's not that great.
File discoverability is poor, most people will not know how to act as a node and mirror files, and there's no builtin privacy protection in place and it's quite easy to figure out which IP addresses are hosting something.
That said there are some nice projects out that leverages IPFS, such as OrbitDB and Wikipedia on IPFS, which by its decentralized nature makes it harder to censor.
You could also dedicate storage and bandwidth by joining a collaborative cluster, which will automatically stay in sync with the master node(s)
Thanks for asking this, one of the devs in the AMA was talking about Bittorrent for sharing the serving of instance-hosted files in a way that made me think "sounds like you want IPFS". Now I'm not so sure.
Trash. I tried to download a few TB of images on it and it has horrible performance.
- It trashes spinners
- it's garbage collection is delete everything. No joke when you have more than x GB they just delete everything to reclaim disk space. I ended up using ZFS volumes and just nuking the disk as it was faster.
- Networking code is garbage with no limits.
- CPU hog
imo its a nice way to make p2p hosted content available as a simple http link using an ipfs gateway (like ipfs.io or cloudflare-ipfs.com)
A no longer developed, but much more promising and private alternative to IPFS: Theseus
