Brave Deprecates IPFS Support | Hacker News Reader

Brave Deprecates IPFS Support

github.com

19 pointspr337h4m7 comments

IPFS is an interesting idea but there are a number of limitations that keep it from taking off. It’s also a bit of a timesink because the initial idea is good and it sucks you in and only later do you see the problems.

What are the problems?, so I save time.

So you want to decentralize your website with IPFS (2017)

https://macwright.com/2017/08/09/decentralize-ipfs

IPFS, Again (2019)

https://macwright.com/2019/06/08/ipfs-again

How IPFS is broken (2020)

https://fiatjaf.com/d5031e5b.html

Why I Moved My Blog from IPFS to a Server

https://neimanslab.org/2024-01-31/why-i-moved-my-blog-ipfs-t...

These articles have HN submissions too, also see this relatively recent thread: Is IPFS working these days?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37750529

My #1 frustration with the evolution of technology over the past quarter century:

I’m nearly certain that there was a window—say around 2009—after IE’s domination had disintegrated through Microsoft’s legal woes & complacency, but before the web’s reorientation to mobile and Chrome-first monoculture, when it would have been possible for a real set of standards and infrastructure for world-wide distributed hash tables and catalogs thereof to emerge and take hold.

But that window closed, probably because the most attractive consumer use case was piracy, and no big players wanted to dive into that morass.

Oh well.

That's a shame. But I've only used IPFS once in Brave. Can it be accessed via an extension or does it require some other client software to access?

It requires a local application and an extension, I think. I found the documentation to be confusing as somebody not familiar with IPFS and eventually gave up on it because I couldn't figure out what the right settings were for me or what the options meant privacy-wise. I also wasn't willing to sink a lot of time or effort into it, because I have enough on my plate generally and I wasn't sure what the benefits were for me.

I am not a frequent IPFS user either but it seems like crypto and NFT scams masked and eventually destroyed a lot of potentially interesting tech.

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