IPFS

I've seen IPFS mentioned on data hoarder before, but never really got into it because it seemed too complicated. When I decided to mess around with Neocities, I saw that they have the option to automatically archive your site to IPFS and the idea of archiving (but not necessarily hosting) my site on IPFS seemed interesting.

https://neocities.org/distributed-web

https://ipfs.io/

IPFS is peer-to-peer, decentralized yada yada. The two key things I'm interested in are:

• since it's peer-to-peer, it may be faster to download from peers than from the origin
• redundancy, so that stuff that I don't want to disappear from the Internet doesn't disappear

Anyway, the site strongly points you towards IPFS Desktop, an Electron app that's just a wrapper around their CLI tool and web interface. The AppImage doesn't support the CLI interface and it's not packaged for my system, but they automatically generate packages using Electron builder. And I'm not installing npm packages on my system, see my previous posts on why.

Turns out that the stuff I actually care about is just a go binary. Skipping straight to the point,

https://github.com/ipfs/go-ipfs

They helpfully point out that this is alpha quality software and may be full of security holes.

The interface is actually dead simple. First, I edited the config to only share pinned files because I'm only interested in sharing a few files rather than everything I consume/visit.

https://docs.ipfs.io/concepts/privacy-and-encryption/

Then you just do:

ipfs add -r folder
ipfs pin add -r ipfs-hash
ipfs name publish /ipfs/ipfs-hash

Where folder is what you want to upload and ipfs-hash is the hash of the content. The last command just lets you access it from a public gateway. There's also a simple web interface, however for some reason, the files I pinned weren't showing up so I had to do it again in the web interface. It also decided to upload my git folder (which the CLI doesn't?) so that gave me a brief moment of panic, even though I don't think there was any sensitive information there. The web interface also allows you to share links to your files from an Internet facing address.

Anyway, here are the links if you are interested.

https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmfFVwMAbk2CD7iUjsQRx37RSAZGE2PKSYpCJAZNpaVhQq

https://gateway.ipfs.io/ipns/k51qzi5uqu5djfjkmv2kvk35g60wg9ofhp8aujeolo0o01gk1tvv29klbrqnj6/