However - important clarification about the Shipyard post that I think a lot of folks are confused by:
While its sad to see the Shipyard team sunset, the IPFS project is decentralized & robust to a single party moving on. IPFS the project/network is not sunsetting or shutting down!
Current focus is lighter-weight stewardship from the IPFS Foundation via grants to individual maintainers, & development of decentralized public infra tools like the Service Worker Gateway.
DASL specifies CIDs, CAR and deterministic CBOR. It deliberately does not specify UnixFS, and it has no way to chunk a file into blocks. UnixFS is what ipfs add has produced since 2015, and what Kubo, Boxo, Helia and the gateways address today. So DASL is the naming layer, not "the core content addressing layer of IPFS". Writing a new format is easy. The stability people built on came from not rewriting this one, and from someone shipping it in the software they already run.
I run Kubo and Helia in production. "Robust to a single party moving on" would be easier to accept with answers to these:
- Who triages vulnerability reports and ships fixes for Kubo, Boxo and Helia after September? Does the contact in https://github.com/ipfs/community/blob/master/SECURITY.md still reach a person? - Will anyone cut releases, or should operators pin current versions and plan around that? Should we expect a community fork? - Who operates ipfs.io, dweb.link and delegated-ipfs.dev day to day after September, and with what experience running public infrastructure at that scale? - What happens to the Service Worker Gateway at https://inbrowser.link ? - What happens to Badbits at https://badbits.dwebops.pub ? Does it stop being updated when Shipyard turns the lights off?
A grant to an individual maintainer is not the same as a named owner with commit rights and a release process.
On the Service Worker Gateway as decentralized public infrastructure: the subdomain gateway spec requires a wildcard TLS certificate for the ipfs and ipns subdomains, plus a Public Suffix List entry so each CID gets its own origin. You also need a denylist, or you end up serving phishing. Very few people reading this thread can self-host that, and the ones who try will meet the abuse problem next.
The same questions are open on discuss.ipfs.tech. A direct answer there would help more than reassurance here.
The way I would put is as: Iroh + iroh-blobs == libp2p + UnixFS + Bitswap, and the latter three are some of the critical components that have defined most IPFS implementations.
Besides just p2p streams seem to be much more useful, those are plug-and-play into most software, e.g. I wrote https://github.com/magik6k/git-remote-iroh that just plugs the git remote proto into iroh and lets you move repo commits between computers by just copying a string from one place to another on push. Doing that with blobs - not gonna happen, not that easily.
And also working to replace the Radicle's networking stack with Iroh: https://radicle.zulipchat.com/#narrow/channel/369274-General...
inauthentic activity seems to move from one product space to another. in 3 years we'll be hearing about stripe shutting down openrouter for example.
IPFS, Freenet, and experiments like that mainly serve as a place for people to store and distribute pirated copyrighted material, child porn, hit lists, terrorism manifestos and plans, and the like.
Scratch a libertarian and, nine times out of ten, you'll find someone who advocates for no or minimal government because they want to do something the government legitimately bars them from doing. Scratch a libertarian decentralized P2P E2EE communication project and you'll find... well, this kind of material nearly every time.
Worse you can store child porn as paper pictures in your house and can privately communicate in there with other unknown people and mignt even be do something illegal there. Do you want to install some police security camera in your toilet?
Oh, and in some countries being LGBTQ+ person or political activist or women right activist is illegal and will land you to execution on chop chop square. Should we also let all the governments find these people too?