this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2023
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IPFS has a ton of potential behind it, as it makes publishing, accessing and retaining content drastically easier than HTTP. The content-addressing also means you can basically sidesteps the whole act of "downloading", no more need to download a file, extract a file, etc. You just access it directly in your file system by a unique name.
That said, I am also very pessimistic on it. IPFS suffer from "underspecification". The protocol is completely focused on just moving bytes around. It doesn't care about copyright or authorship, which becomes a huge problem due to content no longer having a real home in IPFS, everybody can pin, cache or share content on IPFS. It's very much like Bittorrent in this regard, but worse as even Open Source licenses don't help here. IPFS, unlike Bittorrent, doesn't even guarantee that content will stay together, e.g. you can pin and reshare your favorite icon, without a hint of what license it is under or what icon theme you picked it from. For the time being everybody seems to just ignore the problem, but I think it will kill it if it gets popular before this problem is solved.
Another problem is that it's just buggy and slow, especially when it comes to the fuse daemon that provides the /ipfs and /ipns directories. Though that at least is fixable on the client side. The copyright problem might not without some fundamental changes to the protocol itself.
Sounds like a feature, not a shortcoming
It means that using it properly is automatically illegal. I am not seeing how that's a "feature". It renders it completely unusable.
No it doesn't. Maybe in some places? But not in most. You can break copyright laws with pen and paper, which don't have any protection against it and are perfectly legal
With IPFS every single website you look at becomes cached by your node and redistricted by your node, that's the whole point of it. Redistribution is illegal by default, unless explicitly allowed or public domain. The problem is even if it is allowed, say Open Source software, that often comes with conditions such as "you must include the license when you redistribute it". With IPFS even that doesn't work, as each file or even subsections of a file will get redistributed independently, so if the license is in another file than the one you are redistributing, you are in violation of that license. With Bittorrent in contrast you redistributed whole directories at once, so that's fine.
Unless you want to use IPFS exclusively with only 90+ year old works with expired copyright, I just don't see it working. At the moment nobody really cares, since it is small enough, but that can quickly change.
ISPs and sites like Youtube have exceptions that allow them to redistribute illegal stuff, if they remove it when they are notified. No such exception exists for regular users and I'll doubt that we'll ever get one, as with IPFS there is no origin of a piece of content that you can shift the blame to.