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devttyeu 2 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.
tonyhb 18 minutes ago [-]
Iroh seems more comparable to an L7 scoped Tailscale than it does IPFS. It's good, but pretty unrelated.
devttyeu 8 minutes ago [-]
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.
dgellow 2 hours ago [-]
What is PL doing nowadays? I checked the website and don’t understand at all
explorigin 1 hours ago [-]
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.
devttyeu 2 hours ago [-]
"The next big thing" usually
networksrus 44 minutes ago [-]
[flagged]
jadbox 51 minutes ago [-]
who uses Iroh?
ycombinatrix 43 minutes ago [-]
developers, not end users
smalltorch 44 minutes ago [-]
isn't it brand new?
CommanderData 2 hours ago [-]
I love Iroh but it doesn't quite work the same as IPFS if I understand correctly.
knowaveragejoe 2 hours ago [-]
It doesn't, it's a lower level primitive. But things like IPFS can be built on top of it.
scirob 23 minutes ago [-]
I tried to build a few non crypto decentralized apps. The killer was reliable always deliverability inside the browser. https://inbrowser.link/ was a huge jump in utility but came to late the ipfs.js just never worked consistently. In the end the only way to get good XP for yours users was that you provider the IPFS to http gateway for all content but then whats the point its just decentralization theater.
I remember in 2015 having the IPFS concept blow my mind its such a memorable moment when it really felt like someone designed something significantly different that current mainstream paradigms.
But in the end it seems like it was still a case of a cool technology looking for a use-case not solving a real problem.
rhodey 2 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:
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.
chriswarbo 2 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 1 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".
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.
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.
toomuchtodo 2 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.
rhodey 2 hours ago [-]
The arguments for "reproducible builds" are strong and so think reproducible builds but for something that can be loaded in the browser. Browser is a big deal because its a sandbox also. For example Signal could be a webapp if we had content addressable hashing and it would be sandboxed.
stackghost 2 hours ago [-]
Content-addressable storage as a whole is a non-starter with non-technical users.
chriswarbo 2 hours ago [-]
I don't understand. Billions of non-technical users are loading URLs like `https://cdn.foo/?guid=deadbeefdeadbeefdeadbeef` all the time. Why would they care if those URLs became `ipfs://deadbeefdeadbeefdeadbeef` instead?
32 minutes ago [-]
rhodey 2 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"
JuniperMesos 53 minutes ago [-]
> If you have a favourite memory of working with Shipyard, or an idea you always hoped IPFS would eventually achieve, we’d love to hear it. Google Form
One important thing I'd like to see IPFS or a similar decentralized web technology achieve, is getting rid of the necessity of filling out a Google form in order to tell the Shipyard people what I think about their maintenance of IPFS.
Seriously it bugs me when people who ostensibly care about decentralized or privacy technology use a centralized service hosted by a gigantic tech company to accomplish a task because it's convenient (if you already have an account with them), and don't even try to make a decentralized version available. It would have been better if they simply invited people to send them an email.
zeafoamrun 21 minutes ago [-]
Dude they just got shut down and will need to look for new jobs, cut them a tiny bit of slack.
gritzko 2 hours ago [-]
I can not say IPFS was a bad idea. Consider GitHub: it is a massive content-addressed store with a smiley on it. There has been some very hot P2P products, e.g. Tailscale. Protocol Labs had its peak during/after the ICO, but long-term, (1) they did not focus on some particular audience and (2) performance of the network was not great. I personally believe that their bet on DHT was not the right one (I worked in this area long before IPFS btw). OK, in retrospect we are all wise.
It kinda feels like the AWS or Azure of file distribution, so much stuff so confusing. Also apparently with Protocol Labs owning several of those things despite not operating those things?
Ironically seems quite a fragile setup.
Regardless, very sad news.
mmastrac 26 minutes ago [-]
I'm currently on sabbatical looking for volunteer work. I always thought IPFS was an interesting project, might be happy to pitch in some of my now-free bandwidth.
mikert89 2 hours ago [-]
Does IPFS actually have users? I remeber when they raised 270 million and a bunch of people there got wildly wealthy
muragekibicho 8 minutes ago [-]
I guess IPFS is an artifact from the crypto craze. It's pretty silly if you think of it. However, I must admit, I got my first ever developer grant from Filecoin while they were flush with ZIRP era money.
btw,I thought it was an Initial Coin Offering, not an actual fundraise.
airspresso 8 minutes ago [-]
Most of the generative art is hosted on IPFS.
dewey 2 hours ago [-]
The only place where I regularly stumble upon on it was/is on libgen.
runarberg 2 hours ago [-]
Wait are you telling me yet another supposedly ground breaking technology turned out to be yet another grift.
I know a lot of people on HN are going to call me overly cynical. But this pattern should be so obvious by now. Any cynicism to any new ground breaking technology which is gonna solve a problem that exists because of capitalism, that this cynicism is more than warranted.
At this point we should all be cynical of any new technology.
dgellow 2 hours ago [-]
Yeah, I now understand why gray beards are seen as grumpy. Mine isn’t gray yet, but after the 2010s and half of 2020s I can only see as very suspicious any new technology pushed hard by the industry
1 hours ago [-]
thataccount 29 minutes ago [-]
What makes/made IPFS special was how it could be seen with relative ease on the standard internet. That feature allowed it to bypass censorship. I cannot say I am surprised that the funding was not re-upped since it seems like the modern web really loves censoring the crap out of things.
Edited: I also liked how it bypassed the traditional domain system.
aftbit 8 minutes ago [-]
I tried to query a lot of resources (NFT images, many of which are/were hosted on IPFS) from IPFS myself using the official Go server, running on some pretty fast/wide hardware, for a good part of 2021 and 2022. It was a dumpster fire. Here are two specific problems that I remember, though I ran into several more. First, the UDP storm that it created somehow broke my network, where all of my switches gave up and just started sending all of its traffic to all of the nodes on the network. That could have been a "me" thing but it really made it hard to trust. I ended up having to give that server its own VLAN. Second, the caching was brain dead. By default, it would write every resource to the cache even if I was just using it to download them to a local directory, so it wrote everything twice. Even worse, when the cache was full, it would just drop the whole cache, which created huge spikes in IO util. I ended up patching the app to remove caching.
It felt like a really cool demo that never got cleaned up to work as a real production product.
jackinloadup 1 hours ago [-]
I hope this doesn't signal the decline of ipfs overall. I really would like to see an internet where content addressed routing is a thing.
has protocol labs itself made any kind of announcement? i don't see anything on the blog
chriswarbo 2 hours ago [-]
Just checked protocol labs site and... holy shit:
> Protocol Labs is an innovation network driving breakthroughs in computing to push humanity forward. PL connects more than 750 tech startups, funds, accelerators, foundations, open source projects, service providers, and other organizations.
What happened to them? Seems like they drank their own "Web3" Fla-Vor-Aid.
mickael-kerjean 37 minutes ago [-]
Kubo is absolutly amazing, is there a group of people interested in keeping kubo alive? If so I'd love to join that conversation
throwawayffffas 1 hours ago [-]
Always found ipfs and the whole "web 3.0" company to be incredibly obtuse to work with especially compared to previous peer to peer networks like bit-torrent.
I could never shake the feeling there is an unnecessary layer of grift embedded in all the protocols.
zeafoamrun 1 hours ago [-]
I wasn't aware of the relationship between Shipyard and Protocol Labs but it looks like Protocol Labs spun out maintenance and development of a lot of core IPFS technology to a new company called Shipyard, with the idea of cordoning off what was a cost center to Protocol Labs, and the hope was that Shipyard would be able to find other sources of revenue beyond the services funding they got from Protocol Labs.
I'm personally quite disappointed because I just built an IPFS based system built on top of Kubo that I was hoping would take off. Now this throws future maintenance of Kubo into question.
jMyles 1 hours ago [-]
I publish all of my music in ways that are pirate-friendly, which for the moment just means Bit Torrent and IPFS.
If IPFS is starting to wane, does anyone else have a suggestion of a replacement about which I might start to educate my fans?
haunter 1 hours ago [-]
See I thought if IPFS was picked up by the piracy scene (some bigger private trackers for example) then it probably would have been more successful. Alas I haven't seen it outside of libgen and even there I thought it was a backup option only.
scirob 29 minutes ago [-]
also still getting used in some libgen sci-hub mirrors
1 hours ago [-]
sneak 1 hours ago [-]
IPFS never worked right for many years. Great concept, poor implementation. Someone will one day build something that incorporates these ideas.
rvz 2 hours ago [-]
Another shut down post which many of its users did not support the maintainers.
You are going to see a lot more shutdown posts around decentralized or federated technologies if you do not support those tools.
its-summertime 50 minutes ago [-]
Protocol Labs owned significant parts of the infrastructure. Regardless of community support, PL leaving would always be damaging.
dgellow 1 hours ago [-]
There are close to no users of IPFS
Macha 2 hours ago [-]
All those NFT holders where the NFT resolved to a ipfs.io link in shambles
neoncontrails 2 hours ago [-]
I know you jest, but both the IPFS contributors I knew in college graduated to become web3 degens working on decentralized file storage projects. Specifically Walrus, which grew out of Meta's Libra project.
timcobb 2 hours ago [-]
Hahaha thanks for this. It's ok, the asset is the block chain entry duh
0x457 33 minutes ago [-]
The checksum of the asset is on the blockchain. the asset is somewhere else.
timcobb 23 minutes ago [-]
Hmm I thought the asset is the block chain entry because that's what you have the key to, that you can re-sell to someone else. It's like crypto, no?
uproarchat 2 minutes ago [-]
The asset is more akin to a deed or a claim. Most NFTs are images hosted on S3 or IPFS. The blockchain entry is metadata with a pointer to the hosted asset.
bigbuppo 2 hours ago [-]
All my apes gone.
timcobb 21 minutes ago [-]
Gone but not forgotten
yieldcrv 2 hours ago [-]
all the NFTs I launched actually were fully onchain SVGs and CSS
tried to be the change I wanted to see
given where the concept actually found staying power (liquidity pools, instead of collectibles) it wholly needs a new name
“NFT” is distracting at this point, they should just called them 721-structs so people don’t get distracted by the fumbled poorly implemented art use case
jMyles 1 hours ago [-]
Yeah, when we do NFT ticketing these days, we just say, "have your 1155 ready" with a link to explain what that means.
I still think it's pretty obvious that on sufficiently long time-scales that some variant of NFTs will be the winner for event tickets.
simonw 32 minutes ago [-]
What advantage does blockchain ticketing hold over a centralized database of tickets?
frollogaston 12 minutes ago [-]
Resale on third-party markets. Centralized is probably good enough for them though.
frollogaston 1 hours ago [-]
Why not just use the IPFS hash?
Macha 60 minutes ago [-]
This sounds like a smart idea. That's probably why the NFT hype train didn't do it.
frollogaston 36 minutes ago [-]
Looks like at least some of the valuable ones did though. The json payload is on ipfs, then the image url is ipfs://. Example: https://bafybeihpjhkeuiq3k6nqa3fkgeigeri7iebtrsuyuey5y6vy36n... (they stored an ipfs hash only, this link is just a random viewer pointed at it)
Btw it's weirdly annoying to get the json payload for one of these
api 1 hours ago [-]
Finding out NFTs were just links, didn't even embed the asset, was such a moment for me... like either the people pushing this are complete fools or 100% conscious grifters who know it's total bullshit. I suspect it was a mix.
Insane.
I think a lot of the AI skepticism comes from the fact that the last major New Thing (tm) pushed by this industry was crypto. People are very, very burned by that.
That and how badly social media turned out, but that's a whole different discourse.
grebc 32 minutes ago [-]
Crypto / AI, it’s the same people. Same grift for other people’s money in the form of equity.
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.
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.
I remember in 2015 having the IPFS concept blow my mind its such a memorable moment when it really felt like someone designed something significantly different that current mainstream paradigms. But in the end it seems like it was still a case of a cool technology looking for a use-case not solving a real problem.
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.
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 :-(
If you want to reference resources securely, https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Security/Defens... is available and widely supported.
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"
One important thing I'd like to see IPFS or a similar decentralized web technology achieve, is getting rid of the necessity of filling out a Google form in order to tell the Shipyard people what I think about their maintenance of IPFS.
Seriously it bugs me when people who ostensibly care about decentralized or privacy technology use a centralized service hosted by a gigantic tech company to accomplish a task because it's convenient (if you already have an account with them), and don't even try to make a decentralized version available. It would have been better if they simply invited people to send them an email.
It kinda feels like the AWS or Azure of file distribution, so much stuff so confusing. Also apparently with Protocol Labs owning several of those things despite not operating those things?
Ironically seems quite a fragile setup.
Regardless, very sad news.
btw,I thought it was an Initial Coin Offering, not an actual fundraise.
I know a lot of people on HN are going to call me overly cynical. But this pattern should be so obvious by now. Any cynicism to any new ground breaking technology which is gonna solve a problem that exists because of capitalism, that this cynicism is more than warranted.
At this point we should all be cynical of any new technology.
Edited: I also liked how it bypassed the traditional domain system.
It felt like a really cool demo that never got cleaned up to work as a real production product.
> Protocol Labs is an innovation network driving breakthroughs in computing to push humanity forward. PL connects more than 750 tech startups, funds, accelerators, foundations, open source projects, service providers, and other organizations.
What happened to them? Seems like they drank their own "Web3" Fla-Vor-Aid.
I could never shake the feeling there is an unnecessary layer of grift embedded in all the protocols.
I'm personally quite disappointed because I just built an IPFS based system built on top of Kubo that I was hoping would take off. Now this throws future maintenance of Kubo into question.
See: https://pickipedia.xyz/wiki/Cryptograss:Delivery-kid
If IPFS is starting to wane, does anyone else have a suggestion of a replacement about which I might start to educate my fans?
You are going to see a lot more shutdown posts around decentralized or federated technologies if you do not support those tools.
tried to be the change I wanted to see
given where the concept actually found staying power (liquidity pools, instead of collectibles) it wholly needs a new name
“NFT” is distracting at this point, they should just called them 721-structs so people don’t get distracted by the fumbled poorly implemented art use case
I still think it's pretty obvious that on sufficiently long time-scales that some variant of NFTs will be the winner for event tickets.
Btw it's weirdly annoying to get the json payload for one of these
Insane.
I think a lot of the AI skepticism comes from the fact that the last major New Thing (tm) pushed by this industry was crypto. People are very, very burned by that.
That and how badly social media turned out, but that's a whole different discourse.