Web Development

Retiring IPFS

I have begun the process of retiring my usage of IPFS in favor of a system I am prototyping. Until the new system is up and running, I will be moving all the projects I have been publishing to IPFS to the normal clearnet World Wide Web.

My reasons for retiring IPFS are many, but here are the main ones:

It is not private

While it claims to have a level censorship resistance, as of December 2021, IPFS contains no way to provide data without your public IP from being globally enumerable, along with being able to find out what content you are hosting. This makes it poison to anything that a tyrannical government would want to censor.

Designed to Last

I was reading thru the latest posts at No Tech Magazine and saw this article on designing web pages to last a decade. A lot of what is covered very much applies to websites on IPFS. Here is the list from the article (which you should read):

  1. Return to vanilla HTML/CSS
  2. Don’t minimize that HTML
  3. Prefer one page over several
  4. End all forms of hot-linking
  5. Stick with the 13 web safe fonts +2
  6. Obsessively compress your images
  7. Eliminate the broken URL risk

Of these, #1, #2, #4, #5 and #6 absolutely apply to IPFS sites. I am not sold on packing everything into a single page (#3) or completely eliminating site generators (#1), as can be seen by this multi-page website generated by hugo. #7 doesn’t quite translate to IPFS sites because the built-in replication can make the site available when the source server is down.