If you promised to sign and republish the same file every day with a new timestamp, then people would know when they had the latest, and when they didn't... would just have to wonder if you fell off the earth, which we sort of do already with all those abandoned free software projects online.
Republication may be cost prohibitive for large files, so instead you could republish a metadata file that pointed to the latest hash as of the metadata file's publication time.
For the "hit by a bus" problem (or for a server doing this automatically, the "hit by a comet" problem?), it'd be nice to include a dead man's switch from a third party, where they can publish a "FINAL -- EXPECT NO MORE UPDATES"...
But that that point you're trusting a third party. If you're willing to trust a third party this is far easier. So that might be what we'd end up with... something like DNS providers, but they're suddenly managing indexes and metadata for hosted files? I don't know...
(Also, this has probably been worked out already by smarter people than me, I haven't looked at IPFS much, this was just a back of the napkin guess.)
Scheduled republication is my best answer so far.
If you promised to sign and republish the same file every day with a new timestamp, then people would know when they had the latest, and when they didn't... would just have to wonder if you fell off the earth, which we sort of do already with all those abandoned free software projects online.
Republication may be cost prohibitive for large files, so instead you could republish a metadata file that pointed to the latest hash as of the metadata file's publication time.
For the "hit by a bus" problem (or for a server doing this automatically, the "hit by a comet" problem?), it'd be nice to include a dead man's switch from a third party, where they can publish a "FINAL -- EXPECT NO MORE UPDATES"...
But that that point you're trusting a third party. If you're willing to trust a third party this is far easier. So that might be what we'd end up with... something like DNS providers, but they're suddenly managing indexes and metadata for hosted files? I don't know...
(Also, this has probably been worked out already by smarter people than me, I haven't looked at IPFS much, this was just a back of the napkin guess.)