i think some lessons to be learned from #IPFS are "don't make it not work" and "don't make it use 100% of your CPU not working"
@jonny I feel like “don’t name things after the solution to a problem exactly zero people have” should be high on the list. Maybe not in the top slot? But somewhere in the top five.
@mhoye i think the name is playful and tongue in cheek, but it does definitely indicate the kind of priorities and goals that it has which are not necessarily my priorities or goals
Ah, there is a major problem with the name that speaks to your complaint above, but it's not what you think.
IPFS is actually not a file system. It's a database. Above you talked about downloading files from it, which is like embedding files inside a field in an SQL table. It's just not really what the system is designed to do, and for some reason they chose a name that completely misleads as to what it is.
It's an axe I grind that the developers have terrible PR. They really are bad at communicating with the general public about what they're doing, about what it even is, and this is part of that.
The real offering of IPFS is not to be some sort of BitTorrent replacement. If you just want to transfer files, use torrents. That's the right tool for the job. IPFS on the other hand lets you look deep into data with structured key value lookups and all of this other stuff. That's why there's so much overhead, it has all of this database functionality in a system optimized for managing small bits of interrelated content, not Black box files.
I have no idea why they did not call it IPDB but there you go.
@jonny Oh no, not at all.
Working with databases you tend to avoid files in the first place because they are so constraining. If you need to package data up into a file, you can do that with whatever front end you have. It's not really the business of the database because the database doesn't know what file format you want to use.
No, IPFS is not about sharing binary blobs. It's about, you can share your temperature reading or the timestamp of some politician's quote in an interview or whatever, and when you query that you get back the temperature reading or the timestamp, not some binary blob. That's the power that it gives you.
The real value of IPFS is specifically that it looks deeper into the data underneath binary blobs, allowing you to access content directly.
@jonny in that case I'm not sure what problem you're running into, because I have no problem getting a lot of data out of IPFS.
I would understand if you're not able to receive giant files from the system. That's not really what it's for.
But I get bits of data out of it all the time, so if you're not, I can only imagine you have some sort of user error happening on your side.
@volkris @mhoye definitely aware of this. have read the whitepapers and the docs and a decent amount of libp2p. it is used to share data (binary blobs that can be assembled into files) and that should be a pretty baseline feature of any database too lol