IPFS Maintainers Winding Down

Sad to see it go having been a maintainer some years ago.

For anyone wondering, there are more sustainable (with a viable, focused business backing the project) options to do p2p, namely Iroh - https://www.iroh.computer/ which was built by ex-IPFS ex-Protocol Labs devs (I have no relation to the team beyond having worked with them back in the day).

Sadly Protocol Labs is doing.. ehh whatever now, except apparently supporting the projects it got its VC/crypto funding from.

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.

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.

> 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.

Is anyone aware of where IPFS community discussion is taking place? The forum seems almost dead and the community page has broken discord and matrix links.

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.

Does IPFS actually have users? I remeber when they raised 270 million and a bunch of people there got wildly wealthy

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.

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.

What makes/made IPFS special was how it could be seen with relative ease on the standard internet. That feature allowed it to bypass censorship. I cannot say I am surprised that the funding was not re-upped since it seems like the modern web really loves censoring the crap out of things.

Edited: I also liked how it bypassed the traditional domain system.

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.

has protocol labs itself made any kind of announcement? i don't see anything on the blog

Always found ipfs and the whole "web 3.0" company to be incredibly obtuse to work with especially compared to previous peer to peer networks like bit-torrent.

I could never shake the feeling there is an unnecessary layer of grift embedded in all the protocols.

I always thought https://named-data.net in this are was pretty interesting

Kubo is absolutly amazing, is there a group of people interested in keeping kubo alive? If so I'd love to join that conversation

I tried to query a lot of resources (NFT images, many of which are/were hosted on IPFS) from IPFS myself using the official Go server, running on some pretty fast/wide hardware, for a good part of 2021 and 2022. It was a dumpster fire. Here are two specific problems that I remember, though I ran into several more. First, the UDP storm that it created somehow broke my network, where all of my switches gave up and just started sending all of its traffic to all of the nodes on the network. That could have been a "me" thing but it really made it hard to trust. I ended up having to give that server its own VLAN. Second, the caching was brain dead. By default, it would write every resource to the cache even if I was just using it to download them to a local directory, so it wrote everything twice. Even worse, when the cache was full, it would just drop the whole cache, which created huge spikes in IO util. I ended up patching the app to remove caching.

It felt like a really cool demo that never got cleaned up to work as a real production product.

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?

I wasn't aware of the relationship between Shipyard and Protocol Labs but it looks like Protocol Labs spun out maintenance and development of a lot of core IPFS technology to a new company called Shipyard, with the idea of cordoning off what was a cost center to Protocol Labs, and the hope was that Shipyard would be able to find other sources of revenue beyond the services funding they got from Protocol Labs.

I'm personally quite disappointed because I just built an IPFS based system built on top of Kubo that I was hoping would take off. Now this throws future maintenance of Kubo into question.

IPFS never worked right for many years. Great concept, poor implementation. Someone will one day build something that incorporates these ideas.

Another shut down post which many of its users did not support the maintainers.

You are going to see a lot more shutdown posts around decentralized or federated technologies if you do not support those tools.

All those NFT holders where the NFT resolved to a ipfs.io link in shambles

Thanks, this is helpful