Comment by devttyeu
6 hours ago
Sad to see it go having been a maintainer some years ago.
For anyone wondering, there are more sustainable (with a viable, focused business backing the project) options to do p2p, namely Iroh - https://www.iroh.computer/ which was built by ex-IPFS ex-Protocol Labs devs (I have no relation to the team beyond having worked with them back in the day).
Sadly Protocol Labs is doing.. ehh whatever now, except apparently supporting the projects it got its VC/crypto funding from.
Iroh is great! As is ATProto! Both build on DASL (https://dasl.ing/bdasl.html) - which specifies the core content addressing layer of IPFS.
However - important clarification about the Shipyard post that I think a lot of folks are confused by:
While its sad to see the Shipyard team sunset, the IPFS project is decentralized & robust to a single party moving on. IPFS the project/network is not sunsetting or shutting down!
Current focus is lighter-weight stewardship from the IPFS Foundation via grants to individual maintainers, & development of decentralized public infra tools like the Service Worker Gateway.
You are describing Protocol Labs' plans in the first person, as "current focus". If you work there, please say so in the comment. On a thread about Protocol Labs ending the maintainers' funding, that context matters to anyone weighing the reassurance.
DASL specifies CIDs, CAR and deterministic CBOR. It deliberately does not specify UnixFS, and it has no way to chunk a file into blocks. UnixFS is what ipfs add has produced since 2015, and what Kubo, Boxo, Helia and the gateways address today. So DASL is the naming layer, not "the core content addressing layer of IPFS". Writing a new format is easy. The stability people built on came from not rewriting this one, and from someone shipping it in the software they already run.
I run Kubo and Helia in production. "Robust to a single party moving on" would be easier to accept with answers to these:
- Who triages vulnerability reports and ships fixes for Kubo, Boxo and Helia after September? Does the contact in https://github.com/ipfs/community/blob/master/SECURITY.md still reach a person? - Will anyone cut releases, or should operators pin current versions and plan around that? Should we expect a community fork? - Who operates ipfs.io, dweb.link and delegated-ipfs.dev day to day after September, and with what experience running public infrastructure at that scale? - What happens to the Service Worker Gateway at https://inbrowser.link ? - What happens to Badbits at https://badbits.dwebops.pub ? Does it stop being updated when Shipyard turns the lights off?
A grant to an individual maintainer is not the same as a named owner with commit rights and a release process.
On the Service Worker Gateway as decentralized public infrastructure: the subdomain gateway spec requires a wildcard TLS certificate for the ipfs and ipns subdomains, plus a Public Suffix List entry so each CID gets its own origin. You also need a denylist, or you end up serving phishing. Very few people reading this thread can self-host that, and the ones who try will meet the abuse problem next.
The same questions are open on discuss.ipfs.tech. A direct answer there would help more than reassurance here.
Iroh seems more comparable to an L7 scoped Tailscale than it does IPFS. It's good, but pretty unrelated.
We built an IPFS-like system for distributing files in the radicle ecosystem with Iroh and iroh-blobs: https://radicle.network/nodes/iris.radicle.network/rad%3Az4V...
The way I would put is as: Iroh + iroh-blobs == libp2p + UnixFS + Bitswap, and the latter three are some of the critical components that have defined most IPFS implementations.
Iroh got started with IPFS-style content-addressed blob transfers as the primary way to use it, still has that functionality but its now a bit of a second tier citizen. See https://docs.iroh.computer/protocols/blobs
Besides just p2p streams seem to be much more useful, those are plug-and-play into most software, e.g. I wrote https://github.com/magik6k/git-remote-iroh that just plugs the git remote proto into iroh and lets you move repo commits between computers by just copying a string from one place to another on push. Doing that with blobs - not gonna happen, not that easily.
Perhaps the best thing to have come out of IPFS is DASL, used in AT protocol: https://dasl.ing/
Love DASL (funded by IPFS too)! Iroh also meets the DASL spec (https://dasl.ing/bdasl.html). A great bridging opportunity for agents to build interop between many different content addressed systems!
Yep, and Peergos also chose the same subset as DASL.
What is PL doing nowadays? I checked the website and don’t understand at all
It's buzzword soup. All their projects lead to domains with vague descriptions and pictures of the team and zero substance at all.
This. Haven't seen this in the news in years. A few years ago (2022?), they got some $x00 million in investment money. They already had IPFS/IPNS at that point so it was some deep push into Filecoin. But it felt odd at the time. Bitcoin was starting to jump the shark at that point and none of the smarter cryptos had truly found a market fit either.
"The next big thing" usually
Thanks, feel less dumb than when I tried to figure out what it was all about a few months ago.
A few years ago they got into the AI bandwagon and stoped funding the P2P/Web3 stuff from what I remember.
[flagged]
I love Iroh but it doesn't quite work the same as IPFS if I understand correctly.
The way I would put is as: Iroh + iroh-blobs == libp2p + UnixFS + Bitswap, and the latter three are some of the critical components that have defined most IPFS implementations.
It doesn't, it's a lower level primitive. But things like IPFS can be built on top of it.
who uses Iroh?
We're using in Radicle for artifact distribution: https://radicle.network/nodes/iris.radicle.network/rad%3Az4V...
And also working to replace the Radicle's networking stack with Iroh: https://radicle.zulipchat.com/#narrow/channel/369274-General...
I really wish Moonlight would use Iroh. I use Tailscale to make it work, but it would be so much easier to just pair a machine and have it always work.
isn't it brand new?
developers, not end users
there are a lot of completely free file sharing services for authentic activity (e.g. github, google drive)
inauthentic activity seems to move from one product space to another. in 3 years we'll be hearing about stripe shutting down openrouter for example.
please define "authentic activity" and "inauthentic activity"
Legitimate. Legal.
IPFS, Freenet, and experiments like that mainly serve as a place for people to store and distribute pirated copyrighted material, child porn, hit lists, terrorism manifestos and plans, and the like.
Scratch a libertarian and, nine times out of ten, you'll find someone who advocates for no or minimal government because they want to do something the government legitimately bars them from doing. Scratch a libertarian decentralized P2P E2EE communication project and you'll find... well, this kind of material nearly every time.
1 reply →