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Comment by __MatrixMan__ | Hacker News Reader

This is a fundamental flaw in the web. Since we treat a server's name as authoritative, anybody maintaining a replica needs to repeatedly hit that server to know if their remote version is up to date.

If we trusted digital signatures on content instead of server names, we could have a model where a single bit of server load propagates to millions of interested parties. As it is the server must do something distinct for each interested party.

CDNs mitigate this only partially, because mutable data means they have no good cache invalidation strategy.

There's got to be a solution that doesn't involve heaping even more burdensome requirements on those who would dare to publish.

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Content-addressing decouples the hoster from the data itself. Anyone can serve content-addressed data and you can locally verify that you’ve got served the correct bytes. IPFS implements building blocks for such an alternative web.

What irony that this article is about crawling content-addressed data.

Agreed on both points. But it's looking increasingly likely that particular dream is not coming true. Kubo, the reference implementation IPFS node, is maintainerless as of last week.

I'm not sure where IPFS went wrong, but I think our web will continue to degrade until we figure it out. (It'll continue to degrade after that also, but then we can let it burn since we'll have a replacement to switch to).

I think focusing on filecoin was probably the mistake. You've got to build something that people trust first and then consider adding a money-shaped app. If you start with something money-shaped you're indistinguishable from the legions of scams, and that's a hard position to start from if you're wanting to build something trustworthy.

Or poll a merkle tree root hash, like, um, git

What I'm after is a way to get away from polling by server name. With a sufficiently interested audience I ought to be able to be offline except when I need to update the merkle root, meanwhile users can just serve the content to each other.

Do you know Zooko's triangle?

Yes. I don't think human meaningful identifiers are important. We can make do with local pet names, like how Unison works.

We hardly even use the globally consistent names we have. Between humans its always "hey did you check out that website I sent you?" And never "hey did you check out https://foo.bar.biz"

Sharing and endorsement can just be part of the protocol. My reference to the site may as well be in terms of which of my friends think its trustworthy so I'm better enabled to make that determination myself (some of my friends have better taste than others).

Knowing that Alice.brownierecipe.2 and Bob.favoritebrownies refer to the same underlying document with an unfriendly global name is not so gnarly of a UX problem that we need to tolerate single points of failure to avoid it.

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