Durin: A new mobile app for the IPFS network | Hacker News Reader

Durin: A new mobile app for the IPFS network

blog.ipfs.tech

80 pointsmeandave18 comments

Durin focuses on web3.storage gateway at this moment. AFAIK, using this provider requires the authorization for HTTP requests, also limits the storage usage, and ensures the content pinning feature. It doesn't seem to be a new thing added to the protocol but a mobile application supporting interacting with an IPFS gateway via HTTP requests. With current features I saw in Durin for Android, my uploaded content list isn't able to be synchronized across my devices. Anyway, it's prospective in bringing the protocol into mobile devices. Cannot wait to see how far we'll go.

This almost defeats the whole purpose of IPFS's automatic caching of resources. Using HTTP gateways is something anyone already can do in any browser and with a little work on the side of web devs can be done automatically. At the moment what's the point of using Durin?

There’s always going to be a need for centralized services in decentralized systems.

Email has it. Git has it.

I can see a self hosted HTTP gateway with Durin being very useful.

Opening an IPNS domain in this app just takes me to a public resolver (ipns.4everland.io) in my browser rather than doing any IPFS work on my phone. Not very exciting to be honest.

Here for the name:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=uxfoa23skHg

I'm rarely interested in these things, but IPFS seems really nice as far as I've used it, and underrated too.

Was chatting with players of the niche open-source AssaultCube computer game, and turns out they have a not-so-great solution for custom map textures/models. Was thinking of dropping in an IPFS client for them.

My experience is that the network works well for popular files, but if you try to share a file that's not already cached and the other service doesn't use the exact same gateway you do, you're waiting forever to browse the content.

My benchmark for this is sharing a file using the standard IPFS application and then trying to download it through either ipfs.io or Cloudflare's IPFS resolver. It usually took me about two or three timeouts before the file finally appeared and stayed available for a while. Direct IPFS to IPFS transfers using IPFS apps on both sides didn't seem to work well.

The daemons also seemed real CPU heavy for some reason.

It's a real shame, because I like the concept of the protocol. Maybe this approach of using an external, optimized pinning service wolves these problems, but that doesn't align with the goal of IPFS of course.

How is IPFS used in libgen?

It’s one of the sources you can use to download.

I was pinning files with an inexpensive paid service, and it was pretty fast. I don't remember how well it worked when I was self-pinning. But yeah it did seem like it had some technical details to work out.

It's fascinating that iOS safari works correctly but not Chrome. I always assume iOS Safari will be crippled for anything innovative. Another nail in the Google coffin.

thats strange because Chrome on iOS is technically Safari with a Chrome skin.

It’s Android Chrome that doesn’t work (per the linked article).

Anyone use this yet?

I’m using it and it’s more like a “client” for IPFS network. It’s nothing more than a list of HTTP gateways for IPFS. Good point is that it supports uploading, which might enable you to share files without using some other unreliable cloud storage services.

Clicking links is taking me to my default browser.

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