An update to the Hydra Dial Down experiment done in December 2022: as was always the plan, the Hydras have been taken out of the network now. Read more in this post: Unanticipated Shutdown of Hydra Network Bridge Nodes: Analyzing Network Impact and implementing direct IPNI path for recovery. TL;DR follows.
TL;DR
Recently, it was found that Hydra peers were declining in quantity, and ultimately on 2023-04-20 the last Hydra node stopped providing network bridging to IPNI (the InterPlanetary Network Indexer). Internal studies show that Hdyras provided less a ~10% performance gain in the IPFS DHT network. Given the substantial cost of Hydra’s operation, Protocol Labs conducted a "Hydra Dial Down" experiment in December, 2022. The result of this experiment showed low risk and impact, and therefore, we have decided to leave the Hydras non functional replacing their bridging function with a direct path to IPNI on 2023-05-04 from popular gateways like ipfs.io/dweb.link.