Comment by stavros | Hacker News Reader

Comment by stavros | Hacker News Reader

I can't say I disagree with any of this (except maybe the cryptocurrency bit), this was my experience as well. I even made a pinning service (https://eternum.io) years ago, but I shut it down after having to deal with the umpteenth frustration of the IPFS server being slow, not discovering data, not pinning, taking up all the resources, taking up all the space, not pinning, failing to find other nodes, and not pinning.

I think IPFS is a great idea, but I don't think IPFS is a good IPFS. Give me something that is a content-addressable network of people who want to archive/store sets, that sounds like a much better thing.

Imagine: You have 200 GB of free disk space and you want to donate it to the Internet Archive. You connect to its tracker and say "give me 200 GB of your rarest content". The tracker obliges, and soon you have 200 GB of blocks. Or, you can ask people to help you keep your site online, so they pin up to X GB of it. Or, you dedicate Y GB to your OS's packages, and you can fetch them from and send them to other people without needing to contact the package servers at all.

This sounds very much like "BitTorrent but with extensible data sets". Maybe I'll see if it's close enough that I can build it without too much hassle, hmm...

This is BitTorrent with RSS. I built a proof of concept for Libgen and the Internet Archive. The RSS feed spits out torrents least to most seeded, the BitTorrent client joins torrent swarms advertised in the feed until disk space limits are reached. Env vars injected into the Docker container are the RSS feed url and max disk space to use in GB. Very straightforward.

I too was disappointed with IPFS, and my goal was to build the equivalent of the ArchiveTeam Warrior, but for rapid mirroring of existing sets versus archiving ops.

That would work, but I don't like the fact that torrents are separate. I'd like the entire dataset to be one thing. Maybe I'm reinventing Dat?

While I don’t know if IPFA solves this properly, but I’d like a situation where I can move around and organise my content while it still being available to the torrent client.

If I have an arxiv backup, I can’t re-use the same for a arxiv-backup-torrent easily.

I get that disk space is cheap, but I see the allure of a content addressable system to solve for this.

this can be solved on the file system layer below.

on my laptop with btrfs this requires no special effort: simply copying the files and renaming them suffices. nautilus (gnome file manager) uses copy on write, and coreutils "cp" also defaults to "reflink" these days.

Doesn't work for torrents with RAR/ZIP files. The ref-link is also one-way. If I have existing content on my disk, and want to (partially) seed a torrent - can't do that easily.

I'd like a way to say: "Everything inside /public is public-domain content, seed it against any valid torrent if someone shows up with a valid hash"

> give me 200 GB of your rarest content

This sounds like a great utility indeed, I'd love it too !, over time it would make the overall network more and more resilient :D

I don't know if it would be one network, though. You'd definitely need to be able to look up data, obviously, so you could talk to the network to do that, but I think trackers would be a good way to solve some of the issues of IPFS, which means that maybe each tracker had their own "network".

I've wanted something like this many times, though, where I could help keep the IA online. If I could tell my site's visitors "help keep this site online, please donate 1 GB", it would be great.

So https://collab.ipfscluster.io/ shows how you can essentially have content distributed to followers, that may come and go, fetch updates as they will.

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