[momack2]

Sorry to hear about your bad experience, StavrosK.

I think this perspective really depends how you're trying to use IPFS. For example, the ease of use of running a local IPFS node has improved a ton with IPFS-desktop & companion, and tools like ipfs-cohost (https://github.com/ipfs-shipyard/ipfs-cohost) also improve usability and tooling for shared community hosting. I think this has actually seen a ton of progress and end consumer usability has improved significantly in the past year (and is now even coming out-of-the-box in browsers like Brave and Opera!)

I definitely hear that running a beefy IPFS node for local hosting/pinning still needs work, but pinning services like Infura, Temporal, and Pinata have helped abstract some of those challenges from individual applications like this. From a developer perspective, there are a lot of performance improvements for adding, data transfer, and content resolution coming down the line very soon (https://github.com/ipfs/go-ipfs/issues/6776), and there's also been a lot of work improving the ipfs gateways and docs to support the dev community better. I definitely think there is still lots of room for improvement - but also lots of progress to recognize in making IPFS usable to exactly these sorts of applications. Check out qri,io - they're doing collaborative dataset hosting like this and it's pretty slick!

[StavrosK]

You are correct, the end user experience has improved tremendously, I tried the desktop bundle the other day and it was indeed very easy to get started with.

> pinning services like Infura, Temporal, and Pinata have helped abstract some of those challenges

I wonder if you omitted Eternum on purpose :P

(For context, I created and run Eternum, and that experience is mostly where my opinion of IPFS comes from.)

[momack2]

Gotcha! Thank you! Running a pinning service definitely still has rough edges =/ but I know the Infura team recently open sourced some of the tooling they built to make it a bit easier: https://blog.infura.io/new-tools-for-running-ipfs-nodes-196d.... Might help others who are self hosting a large chunk of data on a persistent node too...

If you ever want to chat about how we can make pinning services on IPFS easier to run, would love to chat! I know cluster has been researching how to improve "IPFS for enterprise" usage and would really appreciate the user feedback!

[StavrosK]

Ah, thanks for that link, that would have come in handy a few weeks ago when I migrated the node to a new server.

I would love to chat. My #1 request is to make pinning asynchronous, and generally improve pinning performance. I think that's most of my frustration, followed by slow DHT resolves, followed by large resource usage by the node.

[rklaehn]

Pinning services are nice, but the idea of pinning services is a bit antithetical to the basic philosophy of p2p. If the only way to make something available is e.g. putting something on pinata, I might as well put it on S3.

The basic problem is that the DHT is currently not working, and IPFS is using the DHT in a very demanding way compared to, say, bittorrent or DAT.

I know that there are some fixes in the works, but the next releases really need to solve the DHT problem, otherwise no amount of usability improvements is going to matter...