How to be a nice guy? (Filecoin & public gateway alternatives for seeding?)

Reposted from https://github.com/ipfs/faq/issues/258

Since Filecoin isn’t running yet, and a public gateway requires you to persuade users to use your HTTP(S) address.

What is a good way to configure your node to actively try and reinforce the IPFS network?
Or is there a dedicated utility for this?

I have a few TB of fault-tolerant disk space to spare on a prototyping server of mine with a 100/100mbit connection. Once it’s there it would be great to run Filecoin on that. But for the time being I’d like it to simply help out the network the best way it can.

What I presume would be needed:

  • Start discovering data appearing in want lists, and hoard it to fill up those TBs without pinning (which I hope would automatically strike a balance between rare and popular hashes since those will show up either longer or most often).
  • Set a more lenient ratio for peer reputation.
  • Rate limit how much data you slurp from peers so you don’t saturate their bandwidth and make the network perform worse instead of better.
  • Make the garbage collection as lazy as possible, preserving the largest have list we can fit on remaining disk space.
1 Like

On the same line of thought. Are there any good blocklists like #9 available right now or that I should keep an eye on for the near future? Would be great if my well intended server doesn’t become a hotbed of malware and illegal content.

@flyingzumwalt wrote

My personal inclination, which I can also re-post on discuss.ipfs.io, is to focus on finding datasets that you personally care about or find inspiring (ie. data.gov, wikipedia, or anything you find compelling). If those data are not on IPFS yet, add them. If they’re already on IPFS, pin a copy on your node. Either way, pass around the hashes/links.

That is one way to do it. But it’s easier to name the projects on IPFS I’m not willing to support than those I do. The whole community is brimming with great ideas I’d like to support. Including IPFS itself. Hence a more automated solution is what I would prefer.

Also from my understanding pinning wouldn’t be the most effective way to accelerate the network. From a large set like the wikipedia snapshots, not every page will be as popular or as rare. Some of these will have a balance between supply and demand that is working just fine.

Related discussion:

I really like to contribute in that way as well! So far I have failed to find such a “list” to pin (I presume that there is no other way to actively load and host a mirror with ipfs).

I found it hard to even know “what’s trending in IPFS right now…”.

Yep. If anyone find a way to contribute to IPFS, I’d do it. Mention me if you find an automated way to do it (like Filecoin, but it’s not public yet).

Sorry to revive an old topic, but I’m also wondering about the “set a more lenient ratio for peer reputation” question. I have some content pinned that I’d like to serve to anyone who asks regardless of BitSwap reputation. I’ve had to restart my node a few times because it’s gotten so stingy towards the gateway, and would like to speed things up by effectively turning off BitSwap in favor of always sending data. Is this easy/possible yet without manually editing the policy in go-ipfs?