In my experience: hosting a server takes tons of CPU for some weird reason, exposes your IP addresses along with a queryable list of stuff you host (or even have downloaded, depending on your settings), has huge latency issues, and is extremely limited in its throughput. Its peer-to-peer nature allows for much easier privacy invasions by nodes looking for people interested in certain content.
There are reasons why Brave defaults to an IPFS gateway rather than a direct IPFS client if you try to navigate to an IPFS URL. You can read them here.
It depends on your use case. If you just want your website to be available in different means and don’t care about your IP address being exposed, IPFS is absolutely perfect. If your website ever gets popular, the network will act like a free cache and everyone has a better time. It’s also useful as a backup in case the web server ever goes down, because other nodes may have a copy even if your server bursts into flames. Slow access to web pages still beats no access to web pages!
If you want to browse the web privately and want quick, interactive, responsive websites, try a public resolver or don’t use IPFS. These are not things IPFS excels at right now.
Veilid wasn’t released yet when I wrote that comment. It’s definitely interesting.
I agree that IPFS is rather suboptimal for social media and self hosted stuff. The current main use case, being a place to store the data attached to NFTs accessed almost exclusively through public gateways, works fine though.
In my experience: hosting a server takes tons of CPU for some weird reason, exposes your IP addresses along with a queryable list of stuff you host (or even have downloaded, depending on your settings), has huge latency issues, and is extremely limited in its throughput. Its peer-to-peer nature allows for much easier privacy invasions by nodes looking for people interested in certain content.
There are reasons why Brave defaults to an IPFS gateway rather than a direct IPFS client if you try to navigate to an IPFS URL. You can read them here.
That seems to be a pretty serious set of problems.
It depends on your use case. If you just want your website to be available in different means and don’t care about your IP address being exposed, IPFS is absolutely perfect. If your website ever gets popular, the network will act like a free cache and everyone has a better time. It’s also useful as a backup in case the web server ever goes down, because other nodes may have a copy even if your server bursts into flames. Slow access to web pages still beats no access to web pages!
If you want to browse the web privately and want quick, interactive, responsive websites, try a public resolver or don’t use IPFS. These are not things IPFS excels at right now.
As a user, I don’t want to share my downloaded images if people can use that to datamine my Lemmy browsing, so I wouldn’t use it.
Yes, instances could do the bulk of the sharing, but then that’s just downloading and rehosting images with extra steps.
Something like Veilid would be more interesting.
Veilid wasn’t released yet when I wrote that comment. It’s definitely interesting.
I agree that IPFS is rather suboptimal for social media and self hosted stuff. The current main use case, being a place to store the data attached to NFTs accessed almost exclusively through public gateways, works fine though.