Could be that I'm just really out of touch, but I need at least one paragraph saying "What is this?" (and ideally also, "Who is the target audience?" - or "Why would I be interested in reading this?")
This looks really interesting and I look forward to reading it but IPFS is not the only player in the decentralized web game. One only needs to start typing "IPFS vs" in Google.<p>Perhaps "An IPFS Primer" would be a better title?
"The Decentralized Web" is the WWW system Tim Berners-Lee invented and that we're all using right now. It relies on the DNS and HTTP protocols. This new IPFS-based decentralized web is interesting but it's not even a measurable percentage of web traffic today. Far from being "The".<p>What we need more than anything is to actually realize the beautiful dream TBL had for the WWW. HN is one great example but there should be a million more.
How hard to censor is IPFS? It would be quite disappointing if we managed to switch everyone over to IPFS, and in the end, after all that effort (and the compromises we'd have to make compared to simply using centralized content), governments would remain quite effective at censoring IPFS content.<p>Could ISPs throttle or block IPFS content, for instance? The developers should start assuming some extremely aggressive environments, like China, and then go from there, because honestly, we don't know if 20 years from now a lot more governments would see China's censorship as a role model to follow. We're already seeing multiple countries in Europe considering it to stop "extremist content", the IPSs in Canada are now banding together to block pirated content, and the US is probably not going to be too far behind after the repeal of the net neutrality rules. And those are just the "democratic" countries. It's obviously much worse for Middle Eastern or African countries already.<p>So I just hope the IPFS developers will always try to develop the platform from an extreme resilience point of view.
I don't have any experience with IPFS so I just downloaded the client and ran `ipfs daemon`. It's been using 500-1500Kbps down and 200-500Kbps up for the last 15min or so. It also has 330+ open connections. Is that expected? It seems a bit aggressive for idling. No message on the console indicating what exactly it's doing either.
Decentralization is frequently sold as a means against censorship: if we use a decentralized system such as IPFS, we don't need to have a DNS hierarchy to serve content, so it is no longer viable to block a particular domain.<p>But as long as we have ISPs and a common communications architecture, if we start using a content-addressable system, doesn't that help censorship? As a censor, I jump from having to censor all domains that may serve one particular document (which is difficult, as we can see with pirate bay), to just having to force ISPs to block urls with the hash of the document that I want to censor.<p>So we go from having to jump among domains, to having to jump among content hashes, which seems much less practical, isn't it?<p>In my mind, until we have some sort of mesh network with efficient cache systems, the decentralization topic seems (to me) that is providing answers to the wrong questions.
One thing I've never understood is how IPFS would serve dynamic content. Like imagine building amazon.com on IPFS how would that work? Every single page served would have Different hash, because the content is always changing.
> To build the HTML, PDF, epub and mobi versions of the book with one command, run ./build-book.sh<p>Is it built as a one page anywhere already? Seems weird not to include this by default.
Here's a pretty cool talk on the subject as well by Andre Staltz. It's nothing groundbreaking, but just simple facts he puts on the table to show what the current situation is.<p>Highly recommend.<p><a href="https://youtu.be/qZDJ1z0apVk?t=7786" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/qZDJ1z0apVk?t=7786</a><p>Disclaimer: I helped organize the event where this talk is from.
The biggest advantage of centralization is the ability to delete something from the normie web and have it deleted.<p>Granted, nowadays you have things like the internet archive, but I don't see normal people going along with IPFS for dynamic content like social media as long as you cannot delete things.
Not sure but didn't get any information about how the data is stored between the nodes. Does each node keep full state and synchronize when connected to the network(similar to blockchain), or is the data split between available nodes? Could someone clarify the storage part?