Comment by sadclown42
3 hours ago
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.
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