Carbon is not the only concern here, it is also excessive water use, excessive land use, higher logistics pressure on ports and such which can be reduced if these are made to a higher quality and a reduced quantity.
For the same reason tax codes are complex. If you have a simple law, there's no way for a politician to say to a group of people: "If you vote for me, I will get you a special favour".
It's been several years, but in my experiments it felt plenty fast if I prefetched links at page load time so that they're already local by the time the user actually tries to follow them (sometimes I'd do this out to two hops).
I think it "failed" because people expected it to be a replacement transport layer for the existing web, minus all of the problems the existing web had, and what they got was a radically different kind of web that would have to be built more or less from scratch.
I always figured it was a matter of the existing web getting bad enough, and then we'd see adoption improve. Maybe that time is near.
I'm still working on what I think could be a killer app for it, but progress happens on holidays and vacations and weekends only if I'm lucky, so as you say... it's slow :)
I see the primary issue with IPFS is a significant majority of all web users are on mobile. They can't act as content hosts or routers. In P2P parlance they can only ever act as leeches. Even people with full fledged computers the market is dominated by laptops. These have similar availability issues as phones even if they don't have the same storage or connectivity limitations.
Compared to the total number of users on the Internet relatively few have stable always-on machines ready to host P2P content. ISPs do not make it easy or at times possible to poke holes in firewalls to allow for easy hosting on residential connections. This necessitates hole punching which adds non-trivial delays on connections and overall poorer network performance.
It's less about imagination being dead but instead limitations of the modern Internet retards momentum of P2P anything.
> I see the primary issue with IPFS is a significant majority of all web users are on mobile. They can't act as content hosts or routers.
Is there any reason this has to be true? Probably some majority or significant minority of mobile devices spend some eight hours a day attached to a charger in a place where they have the WiFi password, while the user is asleep. And you don't need 100% of devices to be hosts or routers, 10% at any given time would be more than sufficient.
> open source is, especially, always in conversation with the community of both users and developers
Not necessarily. sqlite doesn't take outside contributions, and seems to not care too much about external opinion (at least, along certain dimensions). sqlite is also coincidentally a great piece of software.
It's interesting to see this land while Rust support of io_uring in a mainstream library is lagging. And not for lack of trying, its just difficult to design a safe (zero-cost) idiomatic Rust abstraction over io_uring's completion based IO.
This sort of purity policing happens to other open source mission driven projects. The same thing happens to Firefox. Open source projects risk spending all their time trying to satisfy a fundamentally extreme minority, while the big commercial projects act with impunity.
It seems like it is hard to cultivate a community that cares about doing the right thing, but is focused and pragmatic about it.
In competitive industries, bad firms will fail. Some industries are not competitive though. I have a friend that went a little crazy working as a PM at a large health insurance firm.
reply