"Cheaper and simpler" only if you are comparing with sites hosted on some big cloud provider. Consider the case where you don't want or can't rely on, e.g, Cloudflare or AwS and ask yourself how you would serve lots of static data without worrying about bandwidth or getting DDOS.
OVH, Mega, insert lots and lots of other providers here. They probably can handle DDOS etc good enough.
I mean is it only for some niche usage (which is totally okay and fine) like serving lots of static data from lesser unknown providers then?
There are two aspects you are ignoring here:
with IPFS you can do it from your own computer
it is content addressable, files are addressed by their hash, which means you can have a system, e.g, different Lemmy instance admins can share a IPFS server and it gets automatically deduplicated, or you can have something like trustless package managers that run without the need of a central authority.
Might not be useful for you, but it should be useful for a lot of people.
Okay for the hash (similarly to https://mysite.com/folder1/IMG.jpg but a string op numbers) buf I upload images and share them from my pc too.
You are really failing to understand how it works, and I am failing to explain it properly.
No. Similar to a Distributed Hash Table. It won't matter if people go https://mysite or https://yoursite`. With a DHT, all you need is the hash of the file, and your node will be able to locate all servers who have the relevant pieces of data and send it to you.
I actually do know how it works, but I sure have a hard time understanding the usefulness.
Then we are going to go in circles: people already described use-cases and your knee-jerk reaction is to respond with "but I can do *something vaguely related* with OVH".
This gets tiring, and I'd rather do something else with my time. Have a good one.
Maybe you're right, and I fail to find any kind of usefulness for this distributed hash table. I really try though, sorry to inconvenience you, but it sure feels like a BTC ledger without the security nor the longevity.
As with a lot of things in the crypto adjacent space, they’re offering a solution looking for problems. Some problems (such as storing and distributing files) are essentially solved (many cheap providers for both storage, distribution, and/or both to choose from), while others (such cryptographically secured immutable ledger for provenance tracking in specific use-cases) might benefit from the technology. Knowing which is which and where to adopt what tech is the challenging part.
I'm 100 percent with you here, I definitely feel like the IPFS "crowd" is trying to find a usefulness, and I hope they do. I'm all for decentralized, protected communication, storage and so on! If you need a proof of that just ask and I'll deliver.
But it feels like they are still looking for that usefulness.
I'm not even here saying "prove me this or that", but I do question the usability which I understand can be felt like an attack for some people.
"Cheaper and simpler" only if you are comparing with sites hosted on some big cloud provider. Consider the case where you don't want or can't rely on, e.g, Cloudflare or AwS and ask yourself how you would serve lots of static data without worrying about bandwidth or getting DDOS.
OVH, Mega, insert lots and lots of other providers here. They probably can handle DDOS etc good enough.
I mean is it only for some niche usage (which is totally okay and fine) like serving lots of static data from lesser unknown providers then?
There are two aspects you are ignoring here:
with IPFS you can do it from your own computer
it is content addressable, files are addressed by their hash, which means you can have a system, e.g, different Lemmy instance admins can share a IPFS server and it gets automatically deduplicated, or you can have something like trustless package managers that run without the need of a central authority.
Might not be useful for you, but it should be useful for a lot of people.
Okay for the hash (similarly to https://mysite.com/folder1/IMG.jpg but a string op numbers) buf I upload images and share them from my pc too.
You are really failing to understand how it works, and I am failing to explain it properly.
No. Similar to a Distributed Hash Table. It won't matter if people go
https://mysiteor https://yoursite`. With a DHT, all you need is the hash of the file, and your node will be able to locate all servers who have the relevant pieces of data and send it to you.I actually do know how it works, but I sure have a hard time understanding the usefulness.
Then we are going to go in circles: people already described use-cases and your knee-jerk reaction is to respond with "but I can do *something vaguely related* with OVH".
This gets tiring, and I'd rather do something else with my time. Have a good one.
Maybe you're right, and I fail to find any kind of usefulness for this distributed hash table. I really try though, sorry to inconvenience you, but it sure feels like a BTC ledger without the security nor the longevity.
As with a lot of things in the crypto adjacent space, they’re offering a solution looking for problems. Some problems (such as storing and distributing files) are essentially solved (many cheap providers for both storage, distribution, and/or both to choose from), while others (such cryptographically secured immutable ledger for provenance tracking in specific use-cases) might benefit from the technology. Knowing which is which and where to adopt what tech is the challenging part.
I'm 100 percent with you here, I definitely feel like the IPFS "crowd" is trying to find a usefulness, and I hope they do. I'm all for decentralized, protected communication, storage and so on! If you need a proof of that just ask and I'll deliver.
But it feels like they are still looking for that usefulness.
I'm not even here saying "prove me this or that", but I do question the usability which I understand can be felt like an attack for some people.