oh man and when Brave removed native IPFS support. https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/37735
replyOh wow they did? I had no idea. Unfortunate
replyI agree that IPNS has always seemed a bit naff; but alternatives naming systems can be used too (if your system's name resolver can understand them); e.g. this uses pkarr addresses for IPFS content: http://www.chriswarbo.net/blog/2026-05-08-pkdnslink.html
replyRegarding an "update path", GNS has support for that built-in; though I've not been able to try it myself, since I can't get GNUNet to bootstrap :-(
I always thought that they should have used ENS instead of whatever coin they ended up making. GNS is cool but IIRC (years ago) it had no incentive mechanism which is I think where a lot of these solutions fall down. Even imaginary "ratio points" that p2p file sharing sites have being using for years work better than "donate your resources out of the goodness of your heart".
replyHalf baked comment but I feel like many of these efforts are too purist. Sure they need to think more carefully about incentives from a systemic angle but also why not accept a hybrid design that doesn't depend on those in the first place? For example plenty of people operate their own nameservers for their own websites to use, or spin up a VPS to support [thing] they make use of. So at a minimum I'm sure webring-style infra where you cover for your friends and they cover for you would work quite well.
replyFor a real world example of a hybrid approach that works see bittorrent where torrents can optionally contain urls that point to alternate download sources in order to speed up the initial seeding phase.
I see this very similar to IPv4 and IPv6, and adoption. Non content addressable URL addressing simply is "good enough" for most use cases, and bittorrent is "good enough" for serving content durably and somewhat in a content addressable manner (file hashes, magnet torrents, immutable torrents). Do we need IPFS URLs? It doesn't appear so, it seems like a solution seeking a problem. IPFS gateways will always be a target for abuse and copyright claims as well.
replyIf you want to reference resources securely, https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Security/Defens... is available and widely supported.
I think something like IPFS is definitely needed. There is nothing stopping you from distributing a webapp on bittorrent but you'll also need to add a README for instructions on how to run the webapp on localhost so a browser can render it. So thats not something that any non-technical user wants to do.
replyArguably that's a browser shortcoming that applies equally to IPFS (as well as all the other "alternative" internet protocols). (But yes I realize IPFS is a much better fit for the purpose when you dig into the details.)
replyCan you share potential webapp use cases that would rely on IPFS or using IPFS for referencing resources would be an improvement? Perhaps my mental has gaps on this topic, and my thoughts and assertions could be incorrect.
replyThe arguments for "reproducible builds" are strong and so think reproducible builds but for something that can be loaded in the browser. Browser is a big deal because its a sandbox also. For example Signal could be a webapp if we had content addressable hashing and it would be sandboxed.
replyContent-addressable storage as a whole is a non-starter with non-technical users.
replyI don't understand. Billions of non-technical users are loading URLs like `https://cdn.foo/?guid=deadbeefdeadbeefdeadbeef` all the time. Why would they care if those URLs became `ipfs://deadbeefdeadbeefdeadbeef` instead?
replydeleted
replyMy go to example: IPFS is Plan9 to bittorrent's UNIX. Some achingly beautiful design, willingness to completely disregard existing messy conventions(for example: The ipfs unified url format) and, like you said, still not enough better for people to want to change.
replyOh and sorry I missed your comment on "Subresource Integrity".
replyThe deal here is Subresource Integrity will only help you if the index.html is considered trusted/authoritative. So you still need a way to get index.html to users and users need a way to say "is this the true index.html"
Why do you need Tailscale?
replyEdit: Okay, so a couple of people have downvoted but no-one has answered.
Why would you use tailscale to secure a web app?
I think parent is talking strictly about P2P, so you'll need (typically) something to help you tunnel between clients, as there are NATs and all sorts of things between two typical consumer computer at two different homes.
replyAh, okay, but that sounds like an incredible pain in the arse to do no matter how you approach it.
reply