After all the control, censorship, privacy violations and general abuse and disrespect that companies such as Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter and others have demonstrated recently, the trend is now that developers are looking more and more at creating distributed and decentralized alternatives to the existing centralized services on the Internet. It looks like Cloudflare wants to position itself as much as possible as some kind of gatekeeper in order to be able to control those alternatives, much like Google and Facebook on today’s Internet.
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Hi kareldonk,
Thx for this article. In background i agree with you : i think is not sense to use a centralize system to use IPFS.
Do you have more alternative instead of install IPFS CLI command because for more usual customer use CLI are complicated.
My mean do you think all application to wrap IPFS are doomed to bring power to their creator is therefore pervert them which from my point of view is the case for many web application that uses IPFS. For exemple i work actually on desktop application about that, all data are persisted locally (no central server) is for more me a better system to share power with all and limit doomed on all persons wich use my application.
But after i think to re-design the web we need also change business model about the web : actually every big actors of this market have the same business model : sell your personal data to industry. what do you think about that and do you have an idea on that ?
Regards
I’m not an IPFS developer myself (not at the moment in any case), but agree that usability can be improved for the end user. If the IPFS developers themselves don’t work on that, then companies like Cloudflare will jump into that and you will get centralization and we’ll be back where we started.
Developers building on IPFS should take care to build in such a way where the goals of the systems they build are aligned with the fundamental goals of IPFS, which among others are decentralization and P2P. This includes storing data in a decentralized way, preferably on the user’s own systems where they have full control over it.
In the end much also relies on helping the end-users to become more aware about the dangers of centralization so that they make the right choices. This is also why I wrote my article about Cloudflare.
hmm, i don’t see why there’s a problem with cloudflare’s gateway. i believe what you think is going to happen is that cloudflare will have complete control of the distributed web through the use of a gateway, but (to my knowledge) this is not the direction in where IPFS is headed. the IPFS team wants to have IPFS everywhere, on every computer, or more importantly, on every browser. js-ipfs, the IPFS team’s implementation of IPFS in javascript and node-js, can work right in your browser.
their plan, from what i see, is to complete this implementation, then get it approved by manufacturers like google and mozilla, which seems to be going well.
i will even go as far as to say that this is a good thing, that this gives IPFS more coverage and publicity. this will only make IPFS more popular, which in turn will accelerate the re-decentralization of the web
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