Conditional pinning?

My understanding is that to ensure content availability on ipfs, you currently have three main options:

  1. Pin content to a node you operate
  2. Use a remote pinning service (typically “centralised”, in that they’re run by a single entity)
  3. Use a service that implements a distributed ledger and interfaces with ipfs (but isn’t native to ipfs)

I’ve had on my mind recently the notion of “conditional pinning”, as the basis for a more decentralised approach to option #2. Essentially enabling any node owner to configure a rule set to control when they would accept an external pin request, to enable use cases such as being able to opt-in to an open pinning marketplace (which also allows for the evolution of more economic incentives, without having to build one into the protocol itself).

At this stage, I just wanted to put the thought out there to see if there are any existing implementations like this in the ecosystem, or whether there has been any previous discussion / conclusions reached about something like it. To me, it seems like a natural evolution to the native ecosystem, to co-exist with centrally-operating pinning services (since I think both have their uses).

I’m pretty sure Filecoin is basically this “pinning marketplace”. Check into that if you haven’t heard of it, or if this is incorrect, let us know what things you think Filecoin might be missing. I’ve never used Filecoin so I could be missing your point.

Perhaps the closest thing without FIL involved is https://collab.ipfscluster.io

Filecoin is not pinning marketplace, anything hosted on Filecoin is not accessible to normal IPFS protocol.
Filecoin may internally use IPFS protocol and use content based addressing, but content on Filecoin storage is not available on normal IPFS.

A decentralised pinning service is crust.network , where you pin your content in decentralised manner.

In short “Crust is what Filecoin should be”.

Thanks for the clarification. Filecoin provides a storage marketplace, but not the pinning API part. So just because pinning services might use Filecoin, doesn’t mean that everything saved in Filecoin can be considered “pinned”. I tend to use the term “pinned” to mean permanently stored, but it has a more nuanced meaning than that.

Thanks everyone for the responses. And yes, interested in solutions that are accessible via IPFS (I’m not quite sure why Filecoin isn’t implemented more directly on top of IPFS).

I will check out Crust and the collab cluster. :slight_smile: