Trying to understand where the storage space is coming from for all the existing ipfs data . . . is it just a bunch of hobbyists setting up some servers in their basements? People with ipfs nodes on their laptops that pop into and out of existence as they power up and down? Who is providing the disk space for the photos I upload via fleek (just as an example)?
Anyone have some ideas about what the landscape looks like?
Itâs a common misconception that IPFS has some kind of magical storage space.
The fact is that you have to run a node for storage, it doesnât have to be you but someone has to. If you use someone else storage they might give you free space but they donât have to and most donât.
For maximum decentralisation everyone would need to run a node.
Itâs when the same data on IPFS is shared by many people that the magic happen.
Thanks for confirming my suspicions. With every announcement of a new IPFS application, I always wonder whoâs going to be hosting all those photos/web sites/whatevers?
Does Protocol Labs (or someone else) publish any statistics on IPFS storage? One thing that the StorJ folks do well is publishing their storage node stats/details. Is there anywhere to get a picture of how many nodes there are and how much storage is out there? I guess Filecoin integration will help with getting more and persistent storage on line. Is there a timetable for that?
Secondly, why do you ask this question ?
Itâs not that itâs a bad one or anything but many web2 services already found ways to make money hosting other people files for free, why couldnât we just apply the same thing to web3.
Thanks for your insights. Iâm only asking because I was just curious and didnât understand how it was working. Like I said, I see many new apps/services in the weekly announcements, and I couldnât figure out where it was all being stored.
Three are lots lots and lots of abandoned apps/services as well, and dead-end ipfs hosted web pages, so maybe thereâs not as much out there as I thought!
Iâm only asking because I was just curious and didnât understand how it was working.
Yeah, Iâve shouldnât have phrased things like that, what I meant is that web2 makes it work so we can too.
Three are lots lots and lots of abandoned apps/services as well, and dead-end ipfs hosted web pages, so maybe thereâs not as much out there as I thought!
This is a valid concern for not IPFS. But on IPFS you can self host your files, so if you care for your files just self host them yourself (or pay someone with filecoin or a pinning service).
Thatâs my next area for a bit of research - Filecoin and how that works with IPFS . . . . if you have any sources of info that youâve found helpful, Iâd appreciate a pointer!
Iâm continually looking for better ways to explain IPFS so hereâs my latest attempt. You can think of IPFS as a system that makes it very easy to ask but not tell. You can stand in the middle of a crowd and shout, âHey does anyone have X that they can give me?â and maybe someone will throw you an X. If you hear someone else asking for X then youâre free to share youâre X with them. What you canât do is simply walk around and say, âTake my X! You take my X and share it with people, NOW!â. Thatâs not very friendly to go around bossing people around like that.
So when people ask why canât I just put something on IPFS and expect it to be replicated forever is like just showing up to your neighbors house and putting your junk in their basement because they have the room and expecting them to keep it safe for as long as you feel like putting it there.
You canât tell people what to do but you can ask them to do things or pay them to do what you want. âIf I give you $5 will you hold on to X and give it to people when they ask for it?â or you can just ask someone to do it for free but just donât be surprised if they get distracted and wander off.
Some people noticed that people are willing to pay for a reliable service so they setup a booth and started selling the service of storing your stuff and sharing it when people ask for it.
So whoâs providing the storage? Right now itâs a mix of random people just being nice and people with booths who are being paid to provide it.
Filecoin is like adding money to our fictional universe. Right now the paid providers are being paid in money that appears from a far off land. You can pay for things and take it back to that far off land and use it there but there is no local currency. Filecoin allows someone to buy and sell their storage and to prove theyâre doing what they say they will.
Your analogy is great and a helpful way to visualize the current situation. What prompted me to ask this was that I keep feeling like Iâm missing something - for example, in the latest IPFS weekly newsletter (#164) thereâs a link to a video with the teaser: " Discord + IPFS? [Check out this brief demo] of uploading a file to IPFS directly from a Discord channel." Great, a new tool. They talk about IPFS like itâs a place that has storage waiting for you to use. This kind of wording is used for almost all the new product announcements. âUpload to IPFS - itâs great!â, so Iâve been wondering - whoâs ponying up the disk space for all these files that all these new tools generating. Are there a few large organizations proving âseed spaceâ, or are there a bunch of hobbyists and casual/occasional people making some space on their ephemeral nodes available when they happen to be on line? Just a bit of a mystery to me. Paying for storage (with Filecoin) is understandable to me as it sounds similar to the STORJ model. But as far as I know, paying for storage with Filecoin is not available yet. Maybe there is much less storage space than my imagination has me believe and that all these files uploaded with these new tools donât last long and just fade away after a while . . . .
I can see that. Unfortunately itâs a tough choice. Either you have the nice simple, âUpload to IPFS - itâs great!â or you kind of go into a long detailed explanation of how exactly that works.
Itâs more like a BYOS, Bring Your Own Storage/Buy Your Own Storage else rely on the charity of others. It doesnât make for a great sound bite but itâs better than the opaque system we have now where youâre not paying Facebook so theyâre going to find some other way of making money from it.
Either you use a centralize system provided by big tech, which u donât have to pay for it in the beginning, or you can use your own d-internet with own server
I mean you are already paying for your fiber cable
I think the technology is much broader than that. the protocols are different. instead of storing files not needed at nodes, the nodes learn what to store and what not to make things more efficient based on whats being asked for by itâs neighbors. there has to be alot of experimentation to figure things out and iron out the kinks. this is why we have the free service so that many users try it so the developers get to figure out whatâs working and whats not. this is my understanding. I think this is really much needed and some funding is going to make it happen. this is my understanding, I might be wrong.
Iâve been wondering if we could use a system based on reciprocity (Iâll pin your stuff on my node if you pin my stuff on yours), and how it could be formalized into code the way filecoin has done it. Maybe itâs an opportunity to build something (Iâll give it some more thought, Iâm a dev for a living, I could possibly come up with something)
In a decentralize system, capitalism shows u provide people obligations to do it for you, some use crypto currencies but I will provide one vanilla example :You are in a network of your company, managers set up peopleâs ipfs so they pin everything thatâs shared with you, because it benefits the entire company if resources like internal resources (binaries, pictures, etc.) are distributed and available in ipfs without paying money to store them in one server.
Or maybe if you are on your own, but app for the future d-internet are hosting a chat room, it would of course be obligated to pin all the chat messages because you want them to be available even after that person turns off devices
To add to the conversation of this topic, I am understanding the storage is provided by your computer thatâs running ipfs, but all ipfs can store files in a cache and provide it to others when they run into them, for example your computer might be hosting ipfsâs documents now if youâve browsed the document through ipfs protocol which it is available on (install the ipfs companion in your browser to automatically browse websites straight from the ipfs network if the website has dnslink enabled ). but the cache wonât stay live after garbage collection by the ipfs implementation, unless youâve pinned it.
Just watched this presentation and found it very interesting. It seems that about 14% of the total nodes (2735) are âalways onâ and the other 85% are on for relatively short periods of time and then go off line. 2735 is actually more nodes than I was expecting, so, for me, thatâs good! My next question now is . . .how much storage space do those nodes represent? Still digging!