This is very nit picky. The entire web works by severs “seeding” data to the client, so by your logic you can’t “put stuff” on the web. The difference with torrents and IPFS is you can have multiple servers seeding the same content, and not be dependent on any one.

I’m not making any predictions about how long Z library stays up, but the illegal seeding of movies and tv shows has remained very strong until today.

IPFS is actually worse to put stuff in than the web or torrents, in my experience.

Last time I tried it, the ipfs service used its own storage scheme. Meaning it's not like pointing Apache at a directory. You take your stuff, and upload it into ipfsd first, and it puts that data into its storage system.

So to do this from scratch (not mirroring somebody else's content) needs a minimum of >62TB -- 31TB of content, which ipfsd will then package into 31TB more + overhead in its storage area.

And of course if you're doing this, you're expecting other people to mirror this stuff, so count on hundreds of terabytes of traffic.

So this is easily ~$3K in hard disks alone, plus the NAS/server hardware, plus traffic, plus the willingness to risk the FBI coming and grabbing all of it.

I know the pain of having to store the payload multiple times when using system like ipfs and zeronet.

It maybe helpful to leave the files in the file system as is, and store the metadata in a sqlite database.

Then integrate it with a p2p network layer for crowd seeding and even content discovery.

IPFS isn't my favourite tool either but you are wrong.

> So to do this from scratch (not mirroring somebody else's content) needs a minimum of >62TB -- 31TB of content, which ipfsd will then package into 31TB more + overhead in its storage area.

IPFS has `nocopy` option for quite some time now, which avoids copying.

> And of course if you're doing this, you're expecting other people to mirror this stuff, so count on hundreds of terabytes of traffic.

Of course you are expecting other people to mirror this stuff, and naturally that will generate some traffic. How is this not a problem with web mirrors or torrents?

> IPFS has `nocopy` option for quite some time now, which avoids copying.

Oh, didn't find about that one. Thanks!

> Of course you are expecting other people to mirror this stuff, and naturally that will generate some traffic. How is this not a problem with web mirrors or torrents?

I mean, if I put a book archive on the web, I'd expect the vast majority of people to just grab whichever book they were interested in. Mirroring is a possibility, but a non-trivial thing to accomplish, and can be discouraged.

Meanwhile, on IPFS I'd expect a much higher likelihood of somebody trying to replicate the whole archive, so one would do well to keep that in mind and to be prepared for it.

You're welcome!

Re #2: Perhaps that's true, but on the other hand, the load will be distributed across all seeders with IPFS whereas your web server will be the only one shouldering it.

Fair point. From my experience people often think ipfs works equal to sth like a shared drive or filecoin, so I had to point that out.

That’s clear from the article, which is about the nontrivial task of making tens of terabytes of data available on IPFS.

> … "If noone seeds it, it is gone." …

This is a very good argument for primarily using ipfs to host high quality content that people will want to preserve long-term…

people are pinning stuff on ipfs with filecoin

there is a free service that does this for you till like 5 gigabits, it pins with filecoin

https://web3.storage/pricing/

I have entire sites hosted for free this way, whereas other hosts like vercel and netlify will charge you for traffic. you can just put your big assets on ipfs+filecoin pins and have unlimited traffic. the ipfs CDNs help with performance.

Interesting. How does the CDN work as web browsers are not yet natively supporting IPFS? Is someone operating the CDN?

The gateways are https, choose one that caches on its own, like cloudflare’s

IPFS is a caching or distributing layer, not a persistent storage. There are some attempts to make a storage that backs IPFS by Filecoin team (Filecoin and IPFS teams have a lot of overlap.)

Isn't that true of anything shared on a network?

Yes, but there are people who claim that IPFS is uncensorable or permanent. I saw that a lot from NFT salespeople who were claiming you’d own something forever with no further payments needed, or even that a copyright claim couldn’t take it down.