IPFS Maintainers Shipyard Shut Down After Protocol Labs Cuts Funding

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.

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:

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.

> 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.

I tried to build a few non crypto decentralized apps. The killer was reliable always deliverability inside the browser. https://inbrowser.link/ was a huge jump in utility but came to late the ipfs.js just never worked consistently. In the end the only way to get good XP for yours users was that you provider the IPFS to http gateway for all content but then whats the point its just decentralization theater.

I remember in 2015 having the IPFS concept blow my mind its such a memorable moment when it really felt like someone designed something significantly different that current mainstream paradigms.

But in the end it seems like it was still a case of a cool technology looking for a use-case not solving a real problem.

Kubo, Helia, Boxo, Rainbow, IPFS Desktop, IPFS Companion, Someguy, Service Worker Gateway, IPFS Check, libp2p, ipfs.io, dweb.link, check.ipfs.network, delegated-ipfs.dev, Wikipedia-on-IPFS.

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.

Does IPFS actually have users? I remeber when they raised 270 million and a bunch of people there got wildly wealthy

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.