Sad to see it go having been a maintainer some years ago.
For anyone wondering, there are more sustainable (with a viable, focused business backing the project) options to do p2p, namely Iroh - https://www.iroh.computer/ which was built by ex-IPFS ex-Protocol Labs devs (I have no relation to the team beyond having worked with them back in the day).
Sadly Protocol Labs is doing.. ehh whatever now, except apparently supporting the projects it got its VC/crypto funding from.
dgellow 1 hours ago [-]
What is PL doing nowadays? I checked the website and don’t understand at all
explorigin 39 minutes ago [-]
This. Haven't seen this in the news in years. A few years ago (2022?), they got some $x00 million in investment money. They already had IPFS/IPNS at that point so it was some deep push into Filecoin. But it felt odd at the time. Bitcoin was starting to jump the shark at that point and none of the smarter cryptos had truly found a market fit either.
devttyeu 1 hours ago [-]
"The next big thing" usually
networksrus 14 minutes ago [-]
[flagged]
jadbox 20 minutes ago [-]
who uses Iroh?
ycombinatrix 12 minutes ago [-]
developers, not end users
smalltorch 14 minutes ago [-]
isn't it brand new?
CommanderData 1 hours ago [-]
I love Iroh but it doesn't quite work the same as IPFS if I understand correctly.
knowaveragejoe 1 hours ago [-]
It doesn't, it's a lower level primitive. But things like IPFS can be built on top of it.
JuniperMesos 22 minutes ago [-]
> If you have a favourite memory of working with Shipyard, or an idea you always hoped IPFS would eventually achieve, we’d love to hear it. Google Form
One important thing I'd like to see IPFS or a similar decentralized web technology achieve, is getting rid of the necessity of filling out a Google form in order to tell the Shipyard people what I think about their maintenance of IPFS.
Seriously it bugs me when people who ostensibly care about decentralized or privacy technology use a centralized service hosted by a gigantic tech company to accomplish a task because it's convenient (if you already have an account with them), and don't even try to make a decentralized version available. It would have been better if they simply invited people to send them an email.
rhodey 2 hours ago [-]
This is really unfortunate. When cloudflare dropped IPFS you could say this next step was sort of already on the way. I may be biased but I think when IPFS decided to put so much time into "IPNS" in order to support non-static webapps years ago what they came up with did not fit the need. And without webapps on IPFS things were going nowhere.
A year or so ago I wrote IPFS-boot which allows serving webapps on IPFS while providing also an update path and without breaking content hashing:
But now if you want to serve a secure webapp and not use IPFS IMO the only option you have is to tell users to install Tailscale and to host the webapp themselves and then to install Tailscale on all devices.
chriswarbo 1 hours ago [-]
I agree that IPNS has always seemed a bit naff; but alternatives naming systems can be used too (if your system's name resolver can understand them); e.g. this uses pkarr addresses for IPFS content: http://www.chriswarbo.net/blog/2026-05-08-pkdnslink.html
Regarding an "update path", GNS has support for that built-in; though I've not been able to try it myself, since I can't get GNUNet to bootstrap :-(
noman-land 46 minutes ago [-]
I always thought that they should have used ENS instead of whatever coin they ended up making. GNS is cool but IIRC (years ago) it had no incentive mechanism which is I think where a lot of these solutions fall down. Even imaginary "ratio points" that p2p file sharing sites have being using for years work better than "donate your resources out of the goodness of your heart".
ErroneousBosh 50 minutes ago [-]
Why do you need Tailscale?
toomuchtodo 2 hours ago [-]
I see this very similar to IPv4 and IPv6, and adoption. Non content addressable URL addressing simply is "good enough" for most use cases, and bittorrent is "good enough" for serving content durably and somewhat in a content addressable manner (file hashes, magnet torrents, immutable torrents). Do we need IPFS URLs? It doesn't appear so, it seems like a solution seeking a problem. IPFS gateways will always be a target for abuse and copyright claims as well.
I think something like IPFS is definitely needed. There is nothing stopping you from distributing a webapp on bittorrent but you'll also need to add a README for instructions on how to run the webapp on localhost so a browser can render it. So thats not something that any non-technical user wants to do.
toomuchtodo 1 hours ago [-]
Can you share potential webapp use cases that would rely on IPFS or using IPFS for referencing resources would be an improvement? Perhaps my mental has gaps on this topic, and my thoughts and assertions could be incorrect.
rhodey 1 hours ago [-]
The arguments for "reproducible builds" are strong and so think reproducible builds but for something that can be loaded in the browser. Browser is a big deal because its a sandbox also. For example Signal could be a webapp if we had content addressable hashing and it would be sandboxed.
stackghost 1 hours ago [-]
Content-addressable storage as a whole is a non-starter with non-technical users.
chriswarbo 1 hours ago [-]
I don't understand. Billions of non-technical users are loading URLs like `https://cdn.foo/?guid=deadbeefdeadbeefdeadbeef` all the time. Why would they care if those URLs became `ipfs://deadbeefdeadbeefdeadbeef` instead?
2 minutes ago [-]
rhodey 1 hours ago [-]
Oh and sorry I missed your comment on "Subresource Integrity".
The deal here is Subresource Integrity will only help you if the index.html is considered trusted/authoritative. So you still need a way to get index.html to users and users need a way to say "is this the true index.html"
gritzko 1 hours ago [-]
I can not say IPFS was a bad idea. Consider GitHub: it is a massive content-addressed store with a smiley on it. There has been some very hot P2P products, e.g. Tailscale. Protocol Labs had its peak during/after the ICO, but long-term, (1) they did not focus on some particular audience and (2) performance of the network was not great. I personally believe that their bet on DHT was not the right one (I worked in this area long before IPFS btw). OK, in retrospect we are all wise.
It kinda feels like the AWS or Azure of file distribution, so much stuff so confusing. Also apparently with Protocol Labs owning several of those things despite not operating those things?
Ironically seems quite a fragile setup.
Regardless, very sad news.
mikert89 1 hours ago [-]
Does IPFS actually have users? I remeber when they raised 270 million and a bunch of people there got wildly wealthy
dewey 1 hours ago [-]
The only place where I regularly stumble upon on it was/is on libgen.
runarberg 1 hours ago [-]
Wait are you telling me yet another supposedly ground breaking technology turned out to be yet another grift.
I know a lot of people on HN are going to call me overly cynical. But this pattern should be so obvious by now. Any cynicism to any new ground breaking technology which is gonna solve a problem that exists because of capitalism, that this cynicism is more than warranted.
At this point we should all be cynical of any new technology.
dgellow 60 minutes ago [-]
Yeah, I now understand why gray beards are seen as grumpy. Mine isn’t gray yet, but after the 2010s and half of 2020s I can only see as very suspicious any new technology pushed hard by the industry
37 minutes ago [-]
mickael-kerjean 7 minutes ago [-]
Kubo is absolutly amazing, if anyone else is interested in making the project stays afloat, let me know.
jackinloadup 43 minutes ago [-]
I hope this doesn't signal the decline of ipfs overall. I really would like to see an internet where content addressed routing is a thing.
ruined 2 hours ago [-]
has protocol labs itself made any kind of announcement? i don't see anything on the blog
chriswarbo 1 hours ago [-]
Just checked protocol labs site and... holy shit:
> Protocol Labs is an innovation network driving breakthroughs in computing to push humanity forward. PL connects more than 750 tech startups, funds, accelerators, foundations, open source projects, service providers, and other organizations.
What happened to them? Seems like they drank their own "Web3" Fla-Vor-Aid.
throwawayffffas 53 minutes ago [-]
Always found ipfs and the whole "web 3.0" company to be incredibly obtuse to work with especially compared to previous peer to peer networks like bit-torrent.
I could never shake the feeling there is an unnecessary layer of grift embedded in all the protocols.
zeafoamrun 55 minutes ago [-]
I wasn't aware of the relationship between Shipyard and Protocol Labs but it looks like Protocol Labs spun out maintenance and development of a lot of core IPFS technology to a new company called Shipyard, with the idea of cordoning off what was a cost center to Protocol Labs, and the hope was that Shipyard would be able to find other sources of revenue beyond the services funding they got from Protocol Labs.
I'm personally quite disappointed because I just built an IPFS based system built on top of Kubo that I was hoping would take off. Now this throws future maintenance of Kubo into question.
jMyles 55 minutes ago [-]
I publish all of my music in ways that are pirate-friendly, which for the moment just means Bit Torrent and IPFS.
If IPFS is starting to wane, does anyone else have a suggestion of a replacement about which I might start to educate my fans?
haunter 39 minutes ago [-]
See I thought if IPFS was picked up by the piracy scene (some bigger private trackers for example) then it probably would have been more successful. Alas I haven't seen it outside of libgen and even there I thought it was a backup option only.
57 minutes ago [-]
sneak 39 minutes ago [-]
IPFS never worked right for many years. Great concept, poor implementation. Someone will one day build something that incorporates these ideas.
rvz 1 hours ago [-]
Another shut down post which many of its users did not support the maintainers.
You are going to see a lot more shutdown posts around decentralized or federated technologies if you do not support those tools.
its-summertime 20 minutes ago [-]
Protocol Labs owned significant parts of the infrastructure. Regardless of community support, PL leaving would always be damaging.
dgellow 58 minutes ago [-]
There are close to no users of IPFS
Macha 2 hours ago [-]
All those NFT holders where the NFT resolved to a ipfs.io link in shambles
neoncontrails 1 hours ago [-]
I know you jest, but both the IPFS contributors I knew in college graduated to become web3 degens working on decentralized file storage projects. Specifically Walrus, which grew out of Meta's Libra project.
timcobb 1 hours ago [-]
Hahaha thanks for this. It's ok, the asset is the block chain entry duh
0x457 2 minutes ago [-]
The checksum of the asset is on the blockchain. the asset is somewhere else.
bigbuppo 1 hours ago [-]
All my apes gone.
yieldcrv 1 hours ago [-]
all the NFTs I launched actually were fully onchain SVGs and CSS
tried to be the change I wanted to see
given where the concept actually found staying power (liquidity pools, instead of collectibles) it wholly needs a new name
“NFT” is distracting at this point, they should just called them 721-structs so people don’t get distracted by the fumbled poorly implemented art use case
jMyles 56 minutes ago [-]
Yeah, when we do NFT ticketing these days, we just say, "have your 1155 ready" with a link to explain what that means.
I still think it's pretty obvious that on sufficiently long time-scales that some variant of NFTs will be the winner for event tickets.
simonw 2 minutes ago [-]
What advantage does blockchain ticketing hold over a centralized database of tickets?
frollogaston 36 minutes ago [-]
Why not just use the IPFS hash?
Macha 29 minutes ago [-]
This sounds like a smart idea. That's probably why the NFT hype train didn't do it.
Finding out NFTs were just links, didn't even embed the asset, was such a moment for me... like either the people pushing this are complete fools or 100% conscious grifters who know it's total bullshit. I suspect it was a mix.
Insane.
I think a lot of the AI skepticism comes from the fact that the last major New Thing (tm) pushed by this industry was crypto. People are very, very burned by that.
That and how badly social media turned out, but that's a whole different discourse.
grebc 1 minutes ago [-]
Crypto / AI, it’s the same people. Same grift for other people’s money in the form of equity.
ThatNodeKid 59 minutes ago [-]
[flagged]
Zxc369 40 minutes ago [-]
Thanks, this is helpful
Rendered at 17:58:13 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
For anyone wondering, there are more sustainable (with a viable, focused business backing the project) options to do p2p, namely Iroh - https://www.iroh.computer/ which was built by ex-IPFS ex-Protocol Labs devs (I have no relation to the team beyond having worked with them back in the day).
Sadly Protocol Labs is doing.. ehh whatever now, except apparently supporting the projects it got its VC/crypto funding from.
One important thing I'd like to see IPFS or a similar decentralized web technology achieve, is getting rid of the necessity of filling out a Google form in order to tell the Shipyard people what I think about their maintenance of IPFS.
Seriously it bugs me when people who ostensibly care about decentralized or privacy technology use a centralized service hosted by a gigantic tech company to accomplish a task because it's convenient (if you already have an account with them), and don't even try to make a decentralized version available. It would have been better if they simply invited people to send them an email.
A year or so ago I wrote IPFS-boot which allows serving webapps on IPFS while providing also an update path and without breaking content hashing:
https://github.com/rhodey/IPFS-boot
But now if you want to serve a secure webapp and not use IPFS IMO the only option you have is to tell users to install Tailscale and to host the webapp themselves and then to install Tailscale on all devices.
Regarding an "update path", GNS has support for that built-in; though I've not been able to try it myself, since I can't get GNUNet to bootstrap :-(
If you want to reference resources securely, https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Security/Defens... is available and widely supported.
The deal here is Subresource Integrity will only help you if the index.html is considered trusted/authoritative. So you still need a way to get index.html to users and users need a way to say "is this the true index.html"
It kinda feels like the AWS or Azure of file distribution, so much stuff so confusing. Also apparently with Protocol Labs owning several of those things despite not operating those things?
Ironically seems quite a fragile setup.
Regardless, very sad news.
I know a lot of people on HN are going to call me overly cynical. But this pattern should be so obvious by now. Any cynicism to any new ground breaking technology which is gonna solve a problem that exists because of capitalism, that this cynicism is more than warranted.
At this point we should all be cynical of any new technology.
> Protocol Labs is an innovation network driving breakthroughs in computing to push humanity forward. PL connects more than 750 tech startups, funds, accelerators, foundations, open source projects, service providers, and other organizations.
What happened to them? Seems like they drank their own "Web3" Fla-Vor-Aid.
I could never shake the feeling there is an unnecessary layer of grift embedded in all the protocols.
I'm personally quite disappointed because I just built an IPFS based system built on top of Kubo that I was hoping would take off. Now this throws future maintenance of Kubo into question.
See: https://pickipedia.xyz/wiki/Cryptograss:Delivery-kid
If IPFS is starting to wane, does anyone else have a suggestion of a replacement about which I might start to educate my fans?
You are going to see a lot more shutdown posts around decentralized or federated technologies if you do not support those tools.
tried to be the change I wanted to see
given where the concept actually found staying power (liquidity pools, instead of collectibles) it wholly needs a new name
“NFT” is distracting at this point, they should just called them 721-structs so people don’t get distracted by the fumbled poorly implemented art use case
I still think it's pretty obvious that on sufficiently long time-scales that some variant of NFTs will be the winner for event tickets.
Insane.
I think a lot of the AI skepticism comes from the fact that the last major New Thing (tm) pushed by this industry was crypto. People are very, very burned by that.
That and how badly social media turned out, but that's a whole different discourse.