this post was submitted on 12 Oct 2023
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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Because you won't be paying for distribution.

If you are just hosting data for yourself, sure, go ahead and stick with a regular storage provider. IPFS is useful for the cases where there will be many people who will be accessing that data. The more popular a file is, the more nodes in the swarm will have it and the less it will be requested from your node specifically.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Yes, very much like torrents

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If you could get a torrent file to display an image in your web browser, yes.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

So regular web browser can browse IPFS only systems?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Yes. Brave has it built-in. Others can do it through an extension.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's cool, still can't see why I wouldn't use http(s) though that is cheaper and simpler?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

"Cheaper and simpler" only if you are comparing with sites hosted on some big cloud provider. Consider the case where you don't want or can't rely on, e.g, Cloudflare or AwS and ask yourself how you would serve lots of static data without worrying about bandwidth or getting DDOS.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

OVH, Mega, insert lots and lots of other providers here. They probably can handle DDOS etc good enough.

I mean is it only for some niche usage (which is totally okay and fine) like serving lots of static data from lesser unknown providers then?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

There are two aspects you are ignoring here:

  • with IPFS you can do it from your own computer

  • it is content addressable, files are addressed by their hash, which means you can have a system, e.g, different Lemmy instance admins can share a IPFS server and it gets automatically deduplicated, or you can have something like trustless package managers that run without the need of a central authority.

Might not be useful for you, but it should be useful for a lot of people.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Okay for the hash (similarly to https://mysite.com/folder1/IMG.jpg but a string op numbers) buf I upload images and share them from my pc too.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You are really failing to understand how it works, and I am failing to explain it properly.

similar to https://mysite.com/folder1/IMG.jpg

No. Similar to a Distributed Hash Table. It won't matter if people go https://mysite or https://yoursite`. With a DHT, all you need is the hash of the file, and your node will be able to locate all servers who have the relevant pieces of data and send it to you.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I actually do know how it works, but I sure have a hard time understanding the usefulness.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Then we are going to go in circles: people already described use-cases and your knee-jerk reaction is to respond with "but I can do *something vaguely related* with OVH".

This gets tiring, and I'd rather do something else with my time. Have a good one.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Maybe you're right, and I fail to find any kind of usefulness for this distributed hash table. I really try though, sorry to inconvenience you, but it sure feels like a BTC ledger without the security nor the longevity.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

As with a lot of things in the crypto adjacent space, they’re offering a solution looking for problems. Some problems (such as storing and distributing files) are essentially solved (many cheap providers for both storage, distribution, and/or both to choose from), while others (such cryptographically secured immutable ledger for provenance tracking in specific use-cases) might benefit from the technology. Knowing which is which and where to adopt what tech is the challenging part.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I'm 100 percent with you here, I definitely feel like the IPFS "crowd" is trying to find a usefulness, and I hope they do. I'm all for decentralized, protected communication, storage and so on! If you need a proof of that just ask and I'll deliver.

But it feels like they are still looking for that usefulness.

I'm not even here saying "prove me this or that", but I do question the usability which I understand can be felt like an attack for some people.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

If I share data on an online hosting I also doesn't pay more for distribution? Or is this for some special cases? I havent checked for a long time but I had over 800Mb/s in like 2010 at OVH and I don't think it has gone exacty down ...

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I assure you, IPFS has a cap too.

The question is, it is higher?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

"IPFS" can not have a cap, because IPFS is not a service provider. IPFS is a protocol.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Fair enough.

So the IPFS network has a cap. Like OVH doesn't have a cap as it's a company, but their network does.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Are you trying to really understand how the thing works, or are you just looking for ways to dismiss the thing so that you can remain ignorant about it.

We're talking about data transmission caps (as in, 1TB/month), not in bandwidth (as in 800MB/s) Also, IPFS is a protocol. The "cap" of the network is only theoretically bound by the amount of nodes running in it, but in practice it doesn't really matter because the bandwidth of any single node will always end up being the real bottleneck.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

I'm not trying to dismiss this thing, but I see not very many usecases for it. That's why I ask all those questions and the answers are not really fulfilling IMO.

BTW 800Mb/s is sure a cap too in its way, a 100MB/s is just that, capped on one second instead of a month.