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by nonsens3 2621 days ago
Swarm and IPFS together with Filecoin try to address the same problem - persistent data storage in a decentralised network.

Swarm is not at all "working already" - the incentivisation layer for nodes to store data for other users is not implemented and currently mostly theoretical and work-in-progress.

IPFS is more mature in comparison to Swarm, but the underlying architecture is rather different.
1 comments
caprese 2621 days ago
What is Swarm's intended incentivisation layer and where can I read about their plans? It seems like all documentation including plans are outdated, and I was ignored in their gitter chatroom where devs wanted to talk about dev things and outreach people seemed nonexistent.

I see things being stored on Swarm without incentives, like plain text

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nonsens3 2621 days ago
Swarm documentation might not be perfect, but it is not outdated - https://swarm-guide.readthedocs.io

I believe the chapters about PSS, Swarm Feeds, ENS, Architecture, among others, are mostly up-to-date.

You can read about the incentivisation layer at https://swarm-gateways.net/bzz:/theswarm.eth/ethersphere/ora...

Currently incentivisation is not integrated or implemented in Swarm, so a user has no guarantees about what happens with their uploaded content. If the node hosting it disconnects from the network, it will be gone. The plans to address this are through the sw^3 protocols suite and/or erasure coding.

Regarding plain text - it doesn't really matter what bytes you store in Swarm - encryption is implemented and you can store non-encrypted or encrypted bytes, this has nothing to do with incentives for persistent storage.

We try to do outreach and answer community questions when possible, but the team is not big and this is currently done on a best-effort base, we could definitely improve on that front, I agree.

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