[wharvle]

IMO the case for something like IPFS gets worse and worse the larger proportion of clients are on battery. This makes it a really poor choice for the modern, public Web, where a whole lot of traffic comes from mobile devices.

Serving things that are mostly or nigh-exclusively used by machines connected to the power grid (and, ideally, great and consistent Internet connections) is a much better use case.

[kmeisthax]

This is half the reason why P2P died in the late 2000s. Mobile clients need to leech off a server to function.

The other reason why it died is privacy. Participating in a P2P network reveals your IP address, which can be used to get a subscriber address via DMCA subpoenas, which is how the RIAA, MPAA, and later Prenda Law attacked the shit out of Gnutella and BitTorrent. Centralized systems don't usually expose their users to legal risk like P2P does.

I have to wonder: how does IPFS protect people from learning what websites I've been on, or have pinned, without compromising the security of the network?

[marcus_holmes]

Spotify killed music sharing, not the RIAA.

There's still plenty of video and book pirating happening. Until the streaming industry gets its shit together and coalesces into a single provider, or allows peering, then that's going to continue.

The legal and privacy risks of P2P are both mitigated very simply with a VPN.

[mjevans]

They also need to just sell a 'license for a "personal private viewing copy"' of a work and provide non-DRM files that users can self archive and maintain.

No, DRM is not necessary, it's already proven that someone, among the 8 billion monkeys (with some really smart ones) hammering away _will_ figure out a way of liberating the data from the shackles. The whole premise is fundamentally broken in that the viewers are distrusted from seeing the data in the clear. It just adds cost, friction, and failure points.

Convenience (EASE OF USE!!!), a fair price, and content that doesn't go away are how alternative distribution methods die. Just low how bootleg booze largely doesn't exist outside of prohibition since the market functions.

[zer00eyz]

>> Just low[sic] how bootleg booze largely doesn't exist outside of prohibition since the market functions.

Tell me that you hang out with law abiding citizens without telling me...

Moonshine, home brew... people are out there sticking it too the man as much as they can.

If you have made home made cider, or beer, or yogurt, pickles, canned anything you know that its a labor but the product is better and far cheaper than what you can buy.

Convenience, quality, ease of use... People will pay a massive premium for these things. This (to this dismay of HN) is the Apple model. You can bleed the customer if they love you, if you have a good product.

This was a problem in early film, and the paramount decree was a thing: https://www.promarket.org/2022/12/12/the-paramount-decrees-a...

One would think that this should apply to streaming services, but sadly no, they get treated like network television did (does).

And I know that one of you will glom on to the paramount decree as an argument for the iPhone App Store shenanigans of late. Sadly they aren't remotely close to each other Apple isnt restricting your timing, or telling you what your price should be.

[apitman]

They had a single provider. They purposefully moved away from that model to make more money, and it's working.

[marcus_holmes]

Maybe, but it's also encouraging people to move back to pirating.

And as I understood it, the streaming wars are more about not wanting one service to dominate the whole industry (or if there is, it's my streaming service) rather than a co-ordinate plan to extract more money from subscribers.

[crtasm]

If everyone's on VPNs, nobody can connect to each other. I'm only aware of a couple of VPN services that offer port forwarding.

[marcus_holmes]

If enough people need port forwarding, VPNs will support port forwarding

[BlueTemplar]

How did it "die" in the late oughties, when FAIs were boasting about releasing routers with built-in NAS with torrent support in 2011, and projects like Popcorn Time only got popular in 2014 ?

[anthk]

A clueless gen-z user maybe, which was born with smartphones. On some media, ED2K and Nicotine+ (Soulseek network) it's the only way to fetch that content. Classical series/movies/comic books/special vinyl editions ripped into FLAC... those won't be at full FLAC/CBZ quality (high DPI png's) on YT/Spotify or whatever web site or APP for tablets.

[kmeisthax]

I misphrased my first sentence. P2P's legal uses died with mobile. For example, Microsoft spent a huge amount of time and money removing the P2P functionality in Skype, because nobody was going to tolerate the data cost and battery drain of running a superpeer in your pocket.

Yes, people still use P2P for piracy. This is actually part of the problem, and why it was so easy for mobile to kill P2P. While P2P itself is legal, associations with piracy meant nobody was willing to use P2P, which meant nobody was going to invest the time or money into making mobile P2P work[0].

Tangent time: Have you ever wondered why we distribute online video through YouTube instead of BitTorrent? Remember, you could just put magnet links in RSS, there was even an RSS/BitTorrent combo client called Democracy[1] which was basically YouTube before YouTube. But a lot of corporate suits didn't want to touch BitTorrent in any capacity, even for things they intended to distribute for free, because of the piracy stink. YouTube was also ridden with piracy, but they cleaned up their act and brand with a bunch of automated moderation tools. So when online video became corporate, all the monetization and ads went to centralized platforms and not decentralized ones.

And as all of this should have tipped you off by now, I'm not a "clueless gen-z user born with smartphones". Even if I was, Zoomers figure out this shit anyway, despite Apple and Google's attempts to starve their brains of oxygen by denying them access to real computers.

[0] Yes, I know about AirDrop. AirDrop is just a taste of what we could have had if real engineering hours had gone into mobile P2P, instead of moving the few early adopters back onto centralized services.

[1] This would later be renamed to Miro and then abandoned as their YouTube API integration broke. Yes, they were also NewPipe before NewPipe.

[anthk]

Peertube can use P2P seeding just fine. Yes, I remember Miro. On 'piracy', that has no sense. A corporation would just use P2P without even mentioning it, such as Wow did for online downloads. Even Steam could do it to save up bandwidth.

[BlueTemplar]

And Activision-Blizzard eventually removed the peer-to-peer functionality from their update downloader.

I'm not sure why you are focusing so much on the mobile aspect though, most PC uses are still not done on a smartphone.

And what is possible changes over the years, even smartphones are massively faster than a decade ago.

I don't recommend that anyone distributes anything through YouTube (or any other platform) any more, and guess what, since a few years ago we now *actually* have a working YouTube (and more recently, Twitch) alternative !

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

And guess what, PeerTube is also P2P (based on WebTorrent) !

Just ignore these walled gardens, their enshittification is well under way anyway, and as long as you can show that alternatives are possible, you'll get enough users to flee them to greener pastures (see Xitter => Mastodon and Reddit => Lemmy as recent examples - though federated rather than p2p ones - I'm not a "decentralization maximalist"...).

P.S.: I've actually used Democracy Player / DTV / Miro for a while, but it was created (slightly) after YouTube, not before... anyway alternative YouTube players like NewPipe are missing the point - there's also the whole side of having to upload your own video through YouTube's shitty interface and random whims of their ContentID. And the whole ContentID extortion business goes away once the extortionists actually have to do the hard work of sending a full blown DMCA takedown, and then possibly have to fight in court against a fair use defense, and this whole thing becomes even more unlikely to work if your server is in a country that basically ignores those (consider how VLC violates DMCA because it's distributing libdvdcss, but they are pretty much untouchable because based in France - or also how MPEG doesn't bother going after the license violators that played a DVD with VLC without acquiring the license).

EDIT : heh, ninjaed about Blizzard and PeerTube...

[anthk]

P2P it's still pretty much alive, at least for Bittorrent and ED2K.