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0 pointsrsstack3y ago0 comments

Won't share my opinion on crypto, but concretely: I believe IPFS only serves static contents (which is what CDNs did a couple of decades ago) and doesn't serve web traffic directly due to latency and throughput limitations without a "centralized" CDN, such a Cloudflare https://developers.cloudflare.com/web3/ipfs-gateway/referenc....

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MacsHeadroom3y ago· 2 in thread

IPFS does serve traffic directly, and faster than through Cloudflare; if you run a local node. It accomplishes this by pre-caching content related to the content you access. So it is a bit network heavy. But I've been using it for about a year and the speed just can't be beat.

https://docs.ipfs.tech/install/ipfs-desktop/

rsstackOP3y ago

Who needs to run the local node? The website owner or the website visitor?

(I never used IPFS.)

MacsHeadroom3y ago

Nobody needs to run a local node because there are proxies like Cloudflare. You've probably "used" IPFS without knowing it.

That said, visitors/people browsing the web can run a local node. A browser add-on overwrites proxy URLs to point at your local node.

Another way to think of it is that a local node is essentially your own personal CDN edge cache. Cloudflare's closest edge cache might be 20ms away. But if you run your own, it's just 0.2ms away!

The web browsing experience, while running a local node, is virtually unchanged. You may simply notice some speed ups loading content which makes heavy use of IPFS (which I regularly do, since most DApps use IPFS extensively).

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