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Comment by jstanley | Hacker News Reader

> That means the "servers" hosting it are distributed across a wide network.

This is a strange way of saying "you're looking at this site through one centralised server hosted at ipfs.io".

Don't get me wrong, IPFS is great. I have released an application that works over IPFS. But I don't think obscuring the difference between a gateway and a node is beneficial. I think the difference needs to be highlighted front and centre, at least until we reach a point where every user is running an IPFS node without realising it.

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> This is a strange way of saying "you're looking at this site through one centralised server hosted at ipfs.io".

No, your rephrasing is completely orthogonal to what they're saying. Both are true. Seems like dishonest nitpicking to me to say that they obscure the difference between a gateway and a node.

Besides, aren't all nodes basically a gateway? Ie, a gateway is effectively just a readonly node on an accessible IP. Any node could be this if not bound the local net.

sure, but practically probably not, because you would need a domain and a easy way to update it + a cert + thats assuming you are not behind some sort of a NAT and have your own IP.

You don't need a certificate and a domain to run a gateway. For a public gateway, sure, that's desirable (though not strictly required), but for a private gateway (that most nodes are probably running anyway) you really don't need any of that. At home I can just go to http://localhost:[someport]/ipfs/[somehash]. With browser plugins you can also translate ipfs.io gateway URLs to your local gateway.

im talking about somebody that does not run a node accessing it via "old internet", im assuming the OP has this in mind with his comment

Well I was replying in the context of someone saying there is a meaningful difference to a gateway vs a node. If you access content via a gateway, your content is hosted by IPFS. The content gains all the benefits of IPFS, but you, the viewer, do not. However, if the IPFS Gateway works, ie it isn't throttling/blocked/etc, then you still get the content. I'm struggling to find a meaningful difference, is what I mean.

Now if everyone accessed the content via a gateway, then sure - that undermines the point of IPFS. But a gateway isn't inherently bad, nor is it worse in most respects than a local node - at least, to my understanding.

I think all gateways are nodes, but a node can at least disable the gateway.

Thanks, yes as a community we need to address the problem of ipfs.io as a centralized DNS gateway. What happens if they don't pay their domain name registration fees?

ipfs companion is worthy of mention:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ipfs-companio...

It converts ipfs.io to use your local resolver (amongst other cool things).

what? your comment is exactly wrong..

The content is being served by many peers on the network. You find the peers through a gateway - ipfs.io is one such gateway but any peer can also act as a gateway.

When you visit the page via ipfs.io you are viewing it via the ipfs.io gateway. The ipfs.io gateway has complete power to censor content, serve malicious content, etc.

You lose most of the benefits of IPFS if you browse via a gateway controlled by somebody else.

You don't find peers through a gateway. A gateway is literally just an IPFS<->HTTP gateway. The gateway does all the IPFS stuff and just serves content to you over normal HTTP.

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