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Except no-one knows what shipyard is and it could more easily be mistaken for the end of IPFS.

Maintainers of IPFS are winding down is much more informative for those not in the space.

This is worth a flag. IPFS no longer having mantainers is VERY far from one company not supporting IPFS anymore.

You are describing Protocol Labs' plans in the first person, as "current focus". If you work there, please say so in the comment. On a thread about Protocol Labs ending the maintainers' funding, that context matters to anyone weighing the reassurance.

DASL specifies CIDs, CAR and deterministic CBOR. It deliberately does not specify UnixFS, and it has no way to chunk a file into blocks. UnixFS is what ipfs add has produced since 2015, and what Kubo, Boxo, Helia and the gateways address today. So DASL is the naming layer, not "the core content addressing layer of IPFS". Writing a new format is easy. The stability people built on came from not rewriting this one, and from someone shipping it in the software they already run.

I run Kubo and Helia in production. "Robust to a single party moving on" would be easier to accept with answers to these:

- Who triages vulnerability reports and ships fixes for Kubo, Boxo and Helia after September? Does the contact in https://github.com/ipfs/community/blob/master/SECURITY.md still reach a person? - Will anyone cut releases, or should operators pin current versions and plan around that? Should we expect a community fork? - Who operates ipfs.io, dweb.link and delegated-ipfs.dev day to day after September, and with what experience running public infrastructure at that scale? - What happens to the Service Worker Gateway at https://inbrowser.link ? - What happens to Badbits at https://badbits.dwebops.pub ? Does it stop being updated when Shipyard turns the lights off?

A grant to an individual maintainer is not the same as a named owner with commit rights and a release process.

On the Service Worker Gateway as decentralized public infrastructure: the subdomain gateway spec requires a wildcard TLS certificate for the ipfs and ipns subdomains, plus a Public Suffix List entry so each CID gets its own origin. You also need a denylist, or you end up serving phishing. Very few people reading this thread can self-host that, and the ones who try will meet the abuse problem next.

The same questions are open on discuss.ipfs.tech. A direct answer there would help more than reassurance here.

We built an IPFS-like system for distributing files in the radicle ecosystem with Iroh and iroh-blobs: https://radicle.network/nodes/iris.radicle.network/rad%3Az4V...

The way I would put is as: Iroh + iroh-blobs == libp2p + UnixFS + Bitswap, and the latter three are some of the critical components that have defined most IPFS implementations.

Iroh got started with IPFS-style content-addressed blob transfers as the primary way to use it, still has that functionality but its now a bit of a second tier citizen. See https://docs.iroh.computer/protocols/blobs

Besides just p2p streams seem to be much more useful, those are plug-and-play into most software, e.g. I wrote https://github.com/magik6k/git-remote-iroh that just plugs the git remote proto into iroh and lets you move repo commits between computers by just copying a string from one place to another on push. Doing that with blobs - not gonna happen, not that easily.

It's buzzword soup. All their projects lead to domains with vague descriptions and pictures of the team and zero substance at all.

This. Haven't seen this in the news in years. A few years ago (2022?), they got some $x00 million in investment money. They already had IPFS/IPNS at that point so it was some deep push into Filecoin. But it felt odd at the time. Bitcoin was starting to jump the shark at that point and none of the smarter cryptos had truly found a market fit either.

"The next big thing" usually

Thanks, feel less dumb than when I tried to figure out what it was all about a few months ago.

A few years ago they got into the AI bandwagon and stoped funding the P2P/Web3 stuff from what I remember.

Love DASL (funded by IPFS too)! Iroh also meets the DASL spec (https://dasl.ing/bdasl.html). A great bridging opportunity for agents to build interop between many different content addressed systems!

The way I would put is as: Iroh + iroh-blobs == libp2p + UnixFS + Bitswap, and the latter three are some of the critical components that have defined most IPFS implementations.

It doesn't, it's a lower level primitive. But things like IPFS can be built on top of it.

We're using in Radicle for artifact distribution: https://radicle.network/nodes/iris.radicle.network/rad%3Az4V...

And also working to replace the Radicle's networking stack with Iroh: https://radicle.zulipchat.com/#narrow/channel/369274-General...

isn't it brand new?

developers, not end users

please define "authentic activity" and "inauthentic activity"

Oh wow they did? I had no idea. Unfortunate

I always thought that they should have used ENS instead of whatever coin they ended up making. GNS is cool but IIRC (years ago) it had no incentive mechanism which is I think where a lot of these solutions fall down. Even imaginary "ratio points" that p2p file sharing sites have being using for years work better than "donate your resources out of the goodness of your heart".

I think something like IPFS is definitely needed. There is nothing stopping you from distributing a webapp on bittorrent but you'll also need to add a README for instructions on how to run the webapp on localhost so a browser can render it. So thats not something that any non-technical user wants to do.

My go to example: IPFS is Plan9 to bittorrent's UNIX. Some achingly beautiful design, willingness to completely disregard existing messy conventions(for example: The ipfs unified url format) and, like you said, still not enough better for people to want to change.

Oh and sorry I missed your comment on "Subresource Integrity".

The deal here is Subresource Integrity will only help you if the index.html is considered trusted/authoritative. So you still need a way to get index.html to users and users need a way to say "is this the true index.html"

I think parent is talking strictly about P2P, so you'll need (typically) something to help you tunnel between clients, as there are NATs and all sorts of things between two typical consumer computer at two different homes.

It's a problem for the entire ecosystem that the most expedient thing to do, the thing that we should have sympathy for them picking under a time of stress, is the thing that relies on people who want to communicate with them having a Google account and having that communication intermediated through Google with no alternative. And since the entire point of Shipyard as an organization is to be stewards of the decentralized web software ecosystem, the fact that they're not using decentralized web tech is relevant to their mission and values.

I wonder if (in theory) it wouldn't make more sense to address this sort of thing at the system resolver level rather than in the browser, the way tor does.

What's silly about it? Content-addressable decentralized storage -- not tied to a cryptocurrency -- is really valuable for censorship-resistant archiving of politically-sensitive data (such as climate change research).

IIRC IPFS was the latest in a long line of Distributed Content-Addressed systems that long predate crypto. AFAICT (obviously I wasn't paying much attention) they went crypto (FileCoin) to fund a base population of storage users to bootstrap its popularity.

But that didn't pan out.

What people did or planned to do with IPFS is pretty silly, but the idea of content addressed storage with cryptographic (not in a crypo coin way) names makes a lot of sense. It would make for a great software distribution method e.g. your game downloads get faster the more people want to play the latest version. It's the combination of Git and BitTorrent and has uses far beyond just hosting warez and NFTs.

Yeah, I now understand why gray beards are seen as grumpy. Mine isn’t gray yet, but after the 2010s and half of 2020s I can only see as very suspicious any new technology pushed hard by the industry

My guess is they banked on Web 3 and now want to pivot to AI instead of vast storage of data.

Filecoin never marketed perpetual storage with a one time payment. Lighthouse is a standalone company.

I always thought it could be the evolution of Bittorrent: updatable torrents (with IPNS), peers sharing files from different "bundles" as long as the bits match.

The problem was that there was no good client for it that was better than current torrent clients. When I tested it you had to keep a duplicate of the files in the ipfs cache directory and the client was CLI based which would alienate most users. There's probably no way to have private trackers or to track seed/leech ratios for communities too.

Ok, then I misremembered, thanks.

(Couldn't it be that the caching behavior of intermediate nodes still make it a possibility?)

I was talking about running a public IPFS gateway. This is what the deny list is for.

The checksum of the asset is on the blockchain. the asset is somewhere else.

All my apes gone.

all the NFTs I launched actually were fully onchain SVGs and CSS

tried to be the change I wanted to see

given where the concept actually found staying power (liquidity pools, instead of collectibles) it wholly needs a new name

“NFT” is distracting at this point, they should just called them 721-structs so people don’t get distracted by the fumbled poorly implemented art use case

This sounds like a smart idea. That's probably why the NFT hype train didn't do it.

Even more so when in most cases no one could explain any real type of ownership in terms of working in most existing legal frameworks.

What would I have owned exactly? What would have ownership entitled... All very reasonable question. Mostly entirely ignored or handwaved...

It was common to store ipfs:// links to the assets, which is reasonable. Though some of them didn't.

An NFT doesn't have to be just a link; nothing in principle stops someone creating a NFT that stores the full bytes of some digital asset directly on the blockchain, just as nothing in principle stops someone from creating a NFT that doesn't do this (or equivalently, a NFT whose on-chain content is simply a text hyperlink to something). The Bitcoin Ordinals concept of Inscriptions (https://docs.ordinals.com/inscriptions.html), which is an attempt to build a NFT system for Bitcoin, does culturally encourage placing the bytes of a digital asset into the Bitcoin blockchain, and the tooling around it assumes this model; but again nothing prevents someone from creating an Inscription whose contents are simply a link to something else.

And of course there's no reason why a NFT has to be used to represent ownership of some kind of digital art - there are other uses for NFTs, such as modeling transferable network permissions or resources.

Ultimately NFTs are a just a specific application of blockchain technology, to represent some kind of resource on a blockchain which could in principle be digital art. If people care about ownership of NFTs representing digital art, that's a social fact about what kinds of art there is market demand for; and whether it matters that the bytes of the digital art are on a blockchain or linked from somewhere else (where they could get taken down or bitrot) is also a social fact.

I actually agree that treating NFTs that merely contain a link to some bytes elsewhere that worked at one point in time is a pretty dumb thing to care about, or have a market for (and the use cases for NFTs where the bytes are actually on-chain are, at best, fairly limited, although I wouldn't say completely nonexistent). And certainly the NFT market of 2021 or so, which had a lot of such NFTs, was driven by a weird social mania and people attempting to grift upon that social mania. This has never bothered me though, because I feel the same way about many markets for physical pieces of art; and ultimately it needs to be possible for people to create markets for things I personally think are dumb or at least don't care about.

Crypto / AI, it’s the same people. Same grift for other people’s money in the form of equity.