Is IPFS in Danger in 2020?

Previously, silent-observer wrote an article titled "The Unstable State of IPFS in 2020". The article stated that IPFS had difficulty developing in 2020, and pointed out the current difficulties faced by IPFS and the shortcomings of the development team.

On March 25, Molly Mackinlay, head of the IPFS project, published an article in response, which was recognized by many IPFS community members, including the handsome Textile co-founder Andrew Hill. (Filecoin official team first dialogue with Textile co-founder)

The original response is as follows:

1. IPFS is stable, and growth is the core

Simply put, I couldn’t agree more with you that “IPFS is in an unstable state”.

I think it's clear that IPFS has had tremendous momentum this year. Both with the core developers and the ecosystem as a whole. Both IPFS and libp2p have seen huge performance gains.

• First, Testground is a necessary and huge step forward for us to test and simulate network performance (not just for IPFS, but all p2p networks) and make necessary performance improvements to content routing and DHT.

  There is a new documentation site to make it easier for new IPFS users to learn about IPFS; ensuring that the Core Working Group incorporates important features into the community (roadmap here).

• Second, there are a lot of exciting advances in the ecosystem.

  For example, a new rust-ipfs implementation is being developed, Terminal.co has a pretty excellent netlify equivalent on ipfs, UnstoppableDomains has an ipfs-native browser and wordpress templates, and Audius, Qri, Texitle, 3box, Pinata, Fission, Berti, Anytype, Temporal and a ton of other groups have all released exciting news in the first three months of the year.

  I think the team and community are growing faster than ever. This is the farthest thing from an "unstable situation" - if we are on a high growth track!

• Finally, as the project lead, I’ve spent the majority of my time over the past year on the IPFS project, and I can honestly say this has been the strongest year the team and community have had in this time.

  I think your warning that any decision “could make IPFS a thing of the past” is ill-timed, alarmist, and wrong. I think you’re trying to be helpful, but writing anonymous, sensationalist posts doesn’t help me really address your concerns, nor does it help the team focus on releasing the biggest go-ipfs release since 0.2.3 (the alpha version).

2. Developer activities are (relatively) organized

I think part of your misunderstanding of how the IPFS working group coordinates comes from your view of the working group, so here are some corrections:

• We don’t have the same engineers on ResNetLab, Testground, and Hydra (the new type of enhanced node required for the 0.5 network upgrade) - each has a dedicated owner, although some particularly prolific engineers help out on multiple projects (especially helping advance priority projects).

• Although the Testground team reviewed at the end of Q4, a more detailed product plan helped us narrow down exactly what was in/out of scope more quickly - we absolutely had a development roadmap and very detailed specs from day one.

  Plans don’t always survive implementation. So the pain points pointed out are to re-scope expectations and narrow down to the most critical MVP. The reason teams do retrospectives (and we do them publicly) is to learn and iterate and capture the lessons we’ve learned for other/future teams.

• The IPFS Working Group has a very active group of core contributors across many different organizations, which has not been depleted by focusing on other projects. You may see us focusing more on this this year (and therefore pausing work on some less polished projects), but this means we have more people than ever working on the most important improvements.

3. IPFS is reasonably priced

As far as "IPFS is expensive" goes, there are a lot of places where you can save money on IPFS.

Incentivized networks like Filecoin/Storj can help drive down the unit price of storage by allowing more users to contribute unused storage space, but there are other savings as well - people storing large, highly overlapping datasets (e.g. package managers like OpenSuse) who store snapshots of the data they store can benefit from deduplication savings, while other groups like Netflix can see performance improvements (and bandwidth savings!) from direct p2p transfers between the nodes they run.

The cost per byte of an “IPFS service provider” is not a good way to judge the overall cost of IPFS, and I think it can also be significantly lower than what we see today.

4. IPFS availability is improving

IPFS is a rapidly evolving open source project, and I agree that we haven't gotten to a point where it's "easy to use," especially for non-developers. A lot of the long-term vision is still a work in progress, and it's being refined every day, and there are a lot of opportunities to get involved to help.

My quick look around the forums revealed a lot more excitement than people frustratingly trying to debug bugs - people getting tips on how to try new things and move the ecosystem forward.

We’re not quite there yet, but we’ve come a long way, and there are tons of groups (like “Texitle”, “3box”, “Terminal.co”, etc.) creating tools to bring IPFS to more areas.

V. Conclusion

There is a significant team dedicated to improving IPFS, and a passionate community that helps the project succeed.

I think 2020 will be the best year yet for IPFS.

over

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