So I got curious about IPFS recently and spend a couple of hours reading through the docs and tutorials. Good news: it’s a very well documented and very ambitious project. The docs in fact struck me as “too good”. As in, this isn’t some amateur writing them there is clearly a ton of work that went into it all. Which made me curious: how does a relatively unknown open source project do this? Where is the money?
Well, the answer was about half way through the tutorial. Basically say you want to publish a web page on IPFS. You put it together on your laptop and start up the IPFS daemon. Cool, you are now online and everyone can see your stuff. But what happens when you disconnect from your Wi-Fi? Well you can have your content pinned by another party and have them serve it. After all, IPFS is all about content addressing so it doesn’t matter who hosts it. But how does that work? Well, a paid service called Pinata is part of the official tutorial. No other service is mentioned. I am sure others exist but how is this going to be different than what we have with the web currently where a huge portion of content is served by a single company (CloudFlare)?
Thanks! We've been making a lot of updates to the documentation to make it easier to use - so glad it feels easy to follow!
I'll follow up on the Pinata docs example. There are a lot of options for how to persist content in the IPFS network, and we should describe all of them (even if Pinata is one of the smoother/easier to use ones for those new to IPFS who don't want to run their own persistent node). Feel free to file an issue or PR on that docs page if you get a second and we'll help get that fixed ASAP.
That's a great idea! I know there's a project in the works to have redundant copies of the Archive stored on Filecoin, so expanding that to also make the data available for Collaborative Clusters should be totally doable. We'd have to slice the archive down into bites that small machines like yours and mine can help with though. Thanks for the suggestion!
Thank you for that info. I am still very new to IPFS but am going to try to learn more before I submit any PRs or anything like that. Is there some way to see how pinned content is distributed? Do pinning services have a standard API for talking to them?
We're actually implementing a standard Pinning API right now! You can check out the spec here (https://github.com/ipfs/pinning-services-api-spec) - currently being integrated by Pinata and soon others.
Well, maybe that, but they (Protocol Labs) also raised $200 million in 30 minutes with Filecoin which is basically just their attempt to create paid decentralized pinning.
>But how does that work? Well, a paid service called Pinata is part of the official tutorial. No other service is mentioned. I am sure others exist but how is this going to be different than what we have with the web currently where a huge portion of content is served by a single company (CloudFlare)?
Besides that there are other pinning services or that you can run your own, you can use multiple at once, and it's also possible for your site's users to help contribute without needing any coordination with you. I'm really excited about the part that users can help host things, even after the owner dies or otherwise gives up on hosting a project. I've been disappointed by how often I find old URLs to pages I've liked stop working; I'd love if I could help continue hosting those pages on their original URLs so they work for everyone, and IPFS seems like a step towards that world.
Well, the answer was about half way through the tutorial. Basically say you want to publish a web page on IPFS. You put it together on your laptop and start up the IPFS daemon. Cool, you are now online and everyone can see your stuff. But what happens when you disconnect from your Wi-Fi? Well you can have your content pinned by another party and have them serve it. After all, IPFS is all about content addressing so it doesn’t matter who hosts it. But how does that work? Well, a paid service called Pinata is part of the official tutorial. No other service is mentioned. I am sure others exist but how is this going to be different than what we have with the web currently where a huge portion of content is served by a single company (CloudFlare)?