this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2023
90 points (95.9% liked)
Asklemmy
43766 readers
1487 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
IPFS is basically fancy torrents. Pieces of media are accessed by the hash of their content and some metadata. It's neat, because it can be linked as a URL/URI similar to stuff hosted on the regular web. But, and the main website doesn't really make that clear AT ALL, all content is only available for as long as there are people interested in it. You access a file and distribute it to others from then on. After a while, people move on and old data is deleted from their cache, etc. Unless you 'pin' a piece of content and STORE IT YOURSELF, there is no guarantee it will still be available even 5 minutes after you delete it from your device.
In short: The website makes it seem as if IPFS is this big black hole of infinite and immutable storage when it actually is highly fragile. It can be great if used correctly though, for example if instances decide to keep an archive of successful posts and thereby share the load of storage and distribution. But because every IPFS member is also a distributor, the same legal problems that arise from torrent use will rear their heads again. So better not watch movies or browse a sub with illegal bits if they are hosted on IPFS. IPFS is not built for privacy either, but that's a problem many p2p projects have.