Comment by rhodey

6 hours ago

This is really unfortunate. When cloudflare dropped IPFS you could say this next step was sort of already on the way. I may be biased but I think when IPFS decided to put so much time into "IPNS" in order to support non-static webapps years ago what they came up with did not fit the need. And without webapps on IPFS things were going nowhere.

A year or so ago I wrote IPFS-boot which allows serving webapps on IPFS while providing also an update path and without breaking content hashing:

https://github.com/rhodey/IPFS-boot

But now if you want to serve a secure webapp and not use IPFS IMO the only option you have is to tell users to install Tailscale and to host the webapp themselves and then to install Tailscale on all devices.

18 comments

rhodey

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chriswarbo  6 hours ago

I agree that IPNS has always seemed a bit naff; but alternatives naming systems can be used too (if your system's name resolver can understand them); e.g. this uses pkarr addresses for IPFS content: http://www.chriswarbo.net/blog/2026-05-08-pkdnslink.html

Regarding an "update path", GNS has support for that built-in; though I've not been able to try it myself, since I can't get GNUNet to bootstrap :-(

  • noman-land  5 hours ago

    I always thought that they should have used ENS instead of whatever coin they ended up making. GNS is cool but IIRC (years ago) it had no incentive mechanism which is I think where a lot of these solutions fall down. Even imaginary "ratio points" that p2p file sharing sites have being using for years work better than "donate your resources out of the goodness of your heart".

    • fc417fc802  2 hours ago

      Half baked comment but I feel like many of these efforts are too purist. Sure they need to think more carefully about incentives from a systemic angle but also why not accept a hybrid design that doesn't depend on those in the first place? For example plenty of people operate their own nameservers for their own websites to use, or spin up a VPS to support [thing] they make use of. So at a minimum I'm sure webring-style infra where you cover for your friends and they cover for you would work quite well.

      For a real world example of a hybrid approach that works see bittorrent where torrents can optionally contain urls that point to alternate download sources in order to speed up the initial seeding phase.

toomuchtodo  6 hours ago

I see this very similar to IPv4 and IPv6, and adoption. Non content addressable URL addressing simply is "good enough" for most use cases, and bittorrent is "good enough" for serving content durably and somewhat in a content addressable manner (file hashes, magnet torrents, immutable torrents). Do we need IPFS URLs? It doesn't appear so, it seems like a solution seeking a problem. IPFS gateways will always be a target for abuse and copyright claims as well.

If you want to reference resources securely, https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Security/Defens... is available and widely supported.

  • rhodey  6 hours ago

    I think something like IPFS is definitely needed. There is nothing stopping you from distributing a webapp on bittorrent but you'll also need to add a README for instructions on how to run the webapp on localhost so a browser can render it. So thats not something that any non-technical user wants to do.

    • fc417fc802  2 hours ago

      Arguably that's a browser shortcoming that applies equally to IPFS (as well as all the other "alternative" internet protocols). (But yes I realize IPFS is a much better fit for the purpose when you dig into the details.)

    • toomuchtodo  6 hours ago

      Can you share potential webapp use cases that would rely on IPFS or using IPFS for referencing resources would be an improvement? Perhaps my mental has gaps on this topic, and my thoughts and assertions could be incorrect.

      1 reply →

  • somat  2 hours ago

    My go to example: IPFS is Plan9 to bittorrent's UNIX. Some achingly beautiful design, willingness to completely disregard existing messy conventions(for example: The ipfs unified url format) and, like you said, still not enough better for people to want to change.

  • rhodey  6 hours ago

    Oh and sorry I missed your comment on "Subresource Integrity".

    The deal here is Subresource Integrity will only help you if the index.html is considered trusted/authoritative. So you still need a way to get index.html to users and users need a way to say "is this the true index.html"

ErroneousBosh  6 hours ago

Why do you need Tailscale?

Edit: Okay, so a couple of people have downvoted but no-one has answered.

Why would you use tailscale to secure a web app?

  • embedding-shape  3 hours ago

    I think parent is talking strictly about P2P, so you'll need (typically) something to help you tunnel between clients, as there are NATs and all sorts of things between two typical consumer computer at two different homes.