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Making a Simple Self-Hosted Photo Gallery With IPFS
(medium.com)
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this post was submitted on 12 Oct 2023
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IPFS builds on the idea that people will share your data benevolent right?
Any idea how much space there is to use?
Not necessarily. There are a good number of providers (e.g, Pinata, Infura) of "Pinning services", which will host the data that you want to make sure it's always available. At first sight, they might seem more expensive than just using something like S3, but if you consider that there is no egress costs for files on IPFS then it might end up a lot cheaper to host content there.
If cost is a reason for concern, then the 5c/GB storage and 8c/GB egress on Pinata isn’t exactly cheaper than S3’s 2.7c/GB storage and 9c/GB egress. You can get much better mileage with something like Backblaze B2 0.6c/GB storage free egress, and couple with CloudFlare or other CDN for much lower egress (often free).
Sure there will be cheaper alternatives (Storj is $0.04 GB stored + $0.007 GB egress), but with IPFS you can e.g, seed from your own home server and not becoming a bottleneck.
Feels like your services there just makes http links with extra steps?
Why would I want to use IPFS with those services instead of just online hosting?
Because you won't be paying for distribution.
If you are just hosting data for yourself, sure, go ahead and stick with a regular storage provider. IPFS is useful for the cases where there will be many people who will be accessing that data. The more popular a file is, the more nodes in the swarm will have it and the less it will be requested from your node specifically.
So like torrenting?
If you could get a torrent file to display an image in your web browser, yes.
So regular web browser can browse IPFS only systems?
Yes. Brave has it built-in. Others can do it through an extension.
Cool. :)
That's cool, still can't see why I wouldn't use http(s) though that is cheaper and simpler?
"Cheaper and simpler" only if you are comparing with sites hosted on some big cloud provider. Consider the case where you don't want or can't rely on, e.g, Cloudflare or AwS and ask yourself how you would serve lots of static data without worrying about bandwidth or getting DDOS.
OVH, Mega, insert lots and lots of other providers here. They probably can handle DDOS etc good enough.
I mean is it only for some niche usage (which is totally okay and fine) like serving lots of static data from lesser unknown providers then?
There are two aspects you are ignoring here:
with IPFS you can do it from your own computer
it is content addressable, files are addressed by their hash, which means you can have a system, e.g, different Lemmy instance admins can share a IPFS server and it gets automatically deduplicated, or you can have something like trustless package managers that run without the need of a central authority.
Might not be useful for you, but it should be useful for a lot of people.
Okay for the hash (similarly to https://mysite.com/folder1/IMG.jpg but a string op numbers) buf I upload images and share them from my pc too.
You are really failing to understand how it works, and I am failing to explain it properly.
No. Similar to a Distributed Hash Table. It won't matter if people go
https://mysiteor https://yoursite`. With a DHT, all you need is the hash of the file, and your node will be able to locate all servers who have the relevant pieces of data and send it to you.I actually do know how it works, but I sure have a hard time understanding the usefulness.
Then we are going to go in circles: people already described use-cases and your knee-jerk reaction is to respond with "but I can do *something vaguely related* with OVH".
This gets tiring, and I'd rather do something else with my time. Have a good one.
Maybe you're right, and I fail to find any kind of usefulness for this distributed hash table. I really try though, sorry to inconvenience you, but it sure feels like a BTC ledger without the security nor the longevity.
As with a lot of things in the crypto adjacent space, they’re offering a solution looking for problems. Some problems (such as storing and distributing files) are essentially solved (many cheap providers for both storage, distribution, and/or both to choose from), while others (such cryptographically secured immutable ledger for provenance tracking in specific use-cases) might benefit from the technology. Knowing which is which and where to adopt what tech is the challenging part.
I'm 100 percent with you here, I definitely feel like the IPFS "crowd" is trying to find a usefulness, and I hope they do. I'm all for decentralized, protected communication, storage and so on! If you need a proof of that just ask and I'll deliver.
But it feels like they are still looking for that usefulness.
I'm not even here saying "prove me this or that", but I do question the usability which I understand can be felt like an attack for some people.
Yes, very much like torrents
If I share data on an online hosting I also doesn't pay more for distribution? Or is this for some special cases? I havent checked for a long time but I had over 800Mb/s in like 2010 at OVH and I don't think it has gone exacty down ...
There is always a cap.
I assure you, IPFS has a cap too.
The question is, it is higher?
"IPFS" can not have a cap, because IPFS is not a service provider. IPFS is a protocol.
Fair enough.
So the IPFS network has a cap. Like OVH doesn't have a cap as it's a company, but their network does.
Are you trying to really understand how the thing works, or are you just looking for ways to dismiss the thing so that you can remain ignorant about it.
We're talking about data transmission caps (as in, 1TB/month), not in bandwidth (as in 800MB/s) Also, IPFS is a protocol. The "cap" of the network is only theoretically bound by the amount of nodes running in it, but in practice it doesn't really matter because the bandwidth of any single node will always end up being the real bottleneck.
I'm not trying to dismiss this thing, but I see not very many usecases for it. That's why I ask all those questions and the answers are not really fulfilling IMO.
BTW 800Mb/s is sure a cap too in its way, a 100MB/s is just that, capped on one second instead of a month.
Yes. That's also how torrents work, and they allow anyone to download any movie in the world. Html files are small, you don't need to share much
So IPFS is for large files? Like I can put up a 1TB file like a torrent?
Well it's designed for the web so it's better at handling relatively small files. But yeah, it would work