Sure, I guess the difference is, torrents have an inherent mechanism of becoming distributed. Once someone else has a whole/part of the file, they begin seeding immediately (unless stopped of course). In the case of this app, I just receive a download link which is a proxy for pulling something from the network. It would be something else, if the way to get a hold of this file would be through an IPFS node that the user was running.
>It would be something else, if the way to get a hold of this file would be through an IPFS node that the user was running.
I agree, this seems to sort of bypass IPFS on the download side because my mom doesn’t have to have a node running to download the picture I send her.
However, one potential benefit of this service could be to act as a foot-in-the-door to gain a user base ... I could imagine a .dmg /.exe in the future setting up an IPFS node for your average non-techie user. Still, that doesn’t solve the problem of competing with existing & simple centralized solutions with similar features, as noted in other comments.
Glad to see people building projects with IPFS. Nice work.
Yes it does. But I don't believe this app is using any actual seeding mechanisms of IPFS from a user perspective. Which is why i'm asking about where the nodes would be to make this distributed and decentralised.
My guess is that the server of this project uploads and "pins" this file in IPFS, in which case it would be no different than a centralised solution. If the server goes down, your file is unaccessible.
Also, when you use this app, you aren't doing this through an IPFS node to then be able to seed it. You are just downloading the already hosted file using a HTTP proxy service that can download from IPFS.
> But I don't believe this app is using any actual seeding mechanisms of IPFS from a user perspective
I'm not sure what you mean here. Any user can "seed" any IPFS file they want, they don't need anything from this service.
> in which case it would be no different than a centralised solution
A distributed solution with N=1 isn't the same as a centralized solution. The difference is that distributed solutions can easily increase N, but centralized solutions can't. In this case, you can distribute the file from as many nodes as you control, which makes this service much better than a centralized solution.
> Also, when you use this app, you aren't doing this through an IPFS node to then be able to seed it
Sure, but you can use something like www.eternum.io (or just run your own IPFS node) to fix that. If you don't want to do either, of course you won't have any of the advantages. It's like saying "cars aren't better than couches, they aren't much more comfortable and they don't run if you don't start the engine".
You might be misunderstanding my position. I think IPFS is great and should be used. But this specific project is not really attending to any problems.
It's in the core functionality of IPFS to be able to host a file and the http proxy is available by default by IPFS. So the real problems are distributing and decentralising the file (such as by running an IPFS node) and this project is not making the slightest attempt at that. Without that there is little point in using this service as it is just like any other centralised hosting service, just so happens that the file is on IPFS.
Doesn't that apply to torrents, too? If 2 or more people don't own (and share) the exact same content, then of course it's not decentralized.