IPFS uploads

submitted by Gangster from (self.IdeasForSaidIt)

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[–][deleted] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (9 children)

Let's say SaidIt ran a copy of ipfspics and we offered it here for image uploads. How is that any more decentralized than SaidIt just offering image uploads?

The catch seems to be that ipfspics is maintaining a list of ipfs hosts which they will mirror the uploads to. So unless there's a third party willing to mirror all SaidIt uploaded images, then the whole thing still seems centralized to me. Maybe I'm missing something.

We make sure that everything you upload to the official ipfs.pics instance is distributed on multiple computers.

[–]Gangster[S] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (4 children)

I upload things to IPFS frequently, and often come back weeks later to find they're still up, even when my computer is offline and I haven't shared them widely.

Who's seeding them in these cases? I have no idea. Might be some big tech company that scours IPFS and autoseeds everything.

[–][deleted] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 children)

That's what I'm getting at, who is making it happen at the end of the day? I don't know a lot about IPFS, but it seems that the ipfs.pics project is footing the bill and ensuring that all of their images stay up (centralization).

But even if IPFS is not a silver bullet for this SaidIt use case, other advantages may make it worth it and mean that we should use it as our approach. Hopefully an expert will pop up in here and set us straight.

[–]Gangster[S] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

I have two basic motivations for the proposal:

  1. Low-cost, decentralised hosting. As you say, this raises some questions, and someone needs to be there to hold the baby.

  2. Censorship-resistance, which is the bigger motivation

[–][deleted] 3 insightful - 2 fun3 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 2 fun -  (1 child)

Thank you for the suggestion! I don't mean to doubt your motivations. Just trying to figure out all of this new tech. And the reasons you listed are great ones and valuable to SaidIt.

[–]Gangster[S] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Right. Part of the ethos here is censorship-resistance, I believe.

[–]magnora7 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 children)

How is that any more decentralized than SaidIt just offering image uploads?

I am trying to wrap my head around this too. I think it would give us the option of decentralization, so if all of saidit and all our backups somehow got destroyed, then the IPFS-hosted data would have a chance to survive.

But at the end of the day I don't know how a user helps host our data. Do they sit on a certain page? Or can they browse the site while sharing? Does it require a browser plugin or download to help peer-share? These are things I still don't understand about it.

[–][deleted] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

That's it, that's where I got stuck too. I did a little more reading, and I think that either we'd have to publish a list of every saidit related ipfs image in hopes that others would request/save/reseed them, or force share everything to another ipfs-pic instances (again requiring a third party that gives a shit).

[–]magnora7 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

I think the latter is what we'd want, or the list would somehow naturally accumulate with code from the site. But I still don't get what actions a user would have to take to actually help host the data, even if they wanted to.

[–][deleted] 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

what actions a user would have to take to actually help host the data

If we only offered ipfs image links or a preference to use ipfs links instead, then people could run a local ipfs instance and this browser extension and then I think when they view the image they are downloading it to their local instance and hosting it for the next guy.

Aside from that, there's the full blown browser only ipfs implementation which can somehow get you swapping media with others directly (no extension, no server side local node, the browser is the node), like BitChute. However I see it's very alpha and they have browser crashing issues. That is some heavyweight js code to be running alongside a site like this too.