Back to decentralization now? Maybe, with IPFS...

ARPANET was designed to be decentralized

The tensions between the United States and the USSR following World Warkrieg led both sides to embark on an extraordinary arms race that would last for decades. However, this arms race was reflected not only in growing stockpiles of nuclear weapons and the landing of humans on the moon, but also in significant developments in the field of information technology: key research units and military entities were to be networked in a way that would be resistant to attacks in the event of a “ Krieg.” ARPANET, the precursor to today’s Internet, emerged from these efforts in 1969. Its design was remarkable: packets were to be routed and delivered within a mesh-like topology.

Today, that sounds like old hat. Peer-to-peer, mesh topology, TCP/IP: What was high tech back then is commonplace today. But the Internet, which was originally very similar to ARPANET, has changed rapidly. Although every Internet user today is also a “prosumer”—whether they’re coolly surfing the blogosphere or just want to share a picture of their dog—the Internet has become centralized. You can search on Google—and find what you’re looking for—social media is on Facebook or Twitter, and if you want to know something, you turn to Wikipedia. Entertainment is on YouTube and Netflix, and IMDb then tells you how good the movie you just watched was.

The trend toward centralization is also evident in the technical field

On the technical side, too, this trend has been evident for years. Hosting is shifting to the cloud and to major providers like Google or Amazon, which, conveniently, are also helping to develop the hottest tools and technologies. Many are actively opposing this development and, out of concern for privacy and security, are once again advocating for decentralization. The blockchain boom was certainly a key factor in this development. With the rise in popularity and the emergence of new tools and platforms, it suddenly became possible for anyone to store information in a decentralized, cryptographically secure manner. And it didn’t take long before virtually everything was “powered by blockchain technology”: logistics, gambling, and even trading cards.

The Interplanetary File System

Meanwhile, a number of interesting projects have emerged, including the InterPlanetary File System(IPFS). IPFS is a peer-to-peer protocol designed to replace HTTP and decentralize the internet once again. It has been in development since 2014 and has already gathered a remarkable following.

The basic principles are simple:

• Each participant in the network stores only the data relevant to them.
• If you want to download data, you do so from participants who have stored it.
• All data is hashed so it can be identified.
• The network helps participants locate the data associated with specific hashes.

IPFS has already proven itself in the fight for freedom of information:
After Wikipedia was blocked in Turkey in 2017, the IPFS team set out to make a snapshot of the site available. This snapshot is stillaccessible today [via a gateway].

Hosting via IPFS is also relatively simple. Once you’ve created your repository and started the daemon, you can add your website to IPFS and pin it. Pinning ensures that the site is permanently stored and accessible to others. The site can then be accessed from anywhere via a gateway: [ipfs.surreal.is].

Challenges for IPFS

But what’s stopping people from dropping everything and moving all their hosting to IPFS? IPFS has a few fundamental problems:

• Since it functions more like a file system, the Interplanetary File System currently only allows for the hosting of static pages. This means that the vast majority of services on the internet simply wouldn’t work using IPFS alone.
• Access times within the file system are very long. This is primarily because the code base isn’t optimized for performance, and at the same time, the network is struggling with its growing size—the current implementation wasn’t designed to handle tens of thousands of users.
• It’s not yet user-friendly. To use IPFS properly, you have to install it on your computer; although there’s already a browser interface, it’s still operated via the command line. If you want to access a resource, you must either work with hashes or request it via a gateway; if you’re searching for something, you’ll hardly find it. Addressing by name using IPNS does work, but it’s cumbersome and not beginner-friendly.

IPFS currently provides no data on the size of the network or the number of peers, but indirect metrics suggest that its popularity is stagnating. Most of the blog posts praising it were written quite some time ago, and IPFS still operates within the filter bubble of a technically savvy audience.

A dying project?

This development seems strangely familiar: Wasn’t the decentralized social network Mastodon once the “hot new Twitter”? Wasn’t Graphite Docs once a serious competitor to Google Docs? Will IPFS disappear from the market just as quickly as it appeared? Probably not. The IPFS community is very active and is actively addressing the issues users are currently experiencing. Many key market players are backing IPFS—for example, Cloudflare has made a gateway available to the public and supports the use of human-readable domains and HTTPS.

Perhaps, however, the success of developments like IPFS or Mastodon doesn’t depend on individuals: Even though decentralization is praised on a small scale, its underlying concept is so disruptive to existing structures that it’s questionable whether society will ever embrace a change of this magnitude—especially if the actual benefit for the individual is minimal.