Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by AgentME 2345 days ago
I really wish everything written about IPFS would just ignore IPNS, and stop presenting it as a standard part of IPFS. The thing IPNS tries to do can be done better by the existing DNS system (which works fine combined with IPFS) or blockchain-based systems like ENS. IPNS is a slow incomplete tech demo glued to the rest. Ignoring IPNS won't impact your understanding of the rest of IPFS. I don't think people relying on IPFS even use IPNS for anything but a curiosity, and it's so bad that I expect many people get turned off of IPFS because they get confused by IPNS's flaws or assume that the rest of IPFS works as badly.

IPFS is good at content-addressed storage. IPNS is not part of content-addressed storage. Tutorials about IPFS should ignore IPNS, and talk about alternative ways to link to IPFS links, like using DNS.