IPFS, Again

Have the stumbling blocks I noticed in 2017 been smoothed over?IPFS is still not usable for websites.I tried, again, to make IPFS work. Jargon and acronyms are reproducing without need or limit, and producing a world of words that mean too much and too little at the same time.Step 2: Browse your website locallyOkay, so I’ve got IPFS running. Clicking a link brings us back to my issue in 2017: the way that the IPFS gateway works will break your links.Essentially, since you’re seeing your website rooted at /ipfs/HASH/, then any link you have that starts with / will go to the wrong place. People use specific plugins just for IPFS, like this one for GatsbyJS, to get it to work.I ended up writing make-relative, a script that rewrites my built site to use relative links. Your browser than uses DNS, a decentralized naming system, to resolve that name to an IP address which is the IP address of the server that has this content.Decentralized web projects have to decide whether they can replicate this system in a purely decentralized way (with no ICANN, Registrar, or company involved), or to rely on DNS to ‘bootstrap’ their systems.The IPFS stack chose to implement all of the ways.There’s DNSLink, a rather practical system that has you add another DNS record to ‘link’ it to your decentralized website.There’s also IPNS, which is purely decentralized, but at the cost of being very, extremely, notably, slow. It also doesn’t produce pretty names – instead it gives you a long hash, just like the ones I saw with ipfs add -r.Those are the fundamentals. But, as far as I can tell, it doesn’t necessarily use IPNS: it could be – and usually is – macwright.org uses DNSLink to indicate an IPFS address. IPFS-based websites do update their DNS records every time that they update their website, so that they can avoid using IPNS, because IPNS is just too slow.This was a tough discovery, because it works against everything I know about DNS – a system that isn’t particularly designed to be fast or scriptable.But, I had to forge on, so I wrote gandi-ipfs, a tool that would let me update my DNS records to use DNSLink. I gleaned this information from a call with the very friendly and helpful Pinata team.Step 5: Host itTo mark our point in the journey, here’s what my script is looking like now.So I’m using my custom script make-relative to make all the links on the site relative, and the script gandi-ipfs to update DNS records.But the server that I start with ipfs daemon stops every time I close my laptop’s lid. Projects that are almost universally avoided – like IPNS – are still included in the main documentation and recommended as if they’re usable.The same goes for language: IPFS has a sprawling set of jargon that’s inconsistently used. IPFS.io still has a web-centric message and promises that it’s useful here and now.