ipfs does not have the ability to automatically spread uploaded files.
Unless other nodes actively download, the file will only exist on the uploaded node.
Ipfs also does not provide a function to search the content hash of uploaded files.
So even if another node wants to download it, you don’t know the content hash of the file you want, then cannot download.
What is the expected use of ipfs?
From my understanding IPFS is mostly meant as a replacement for the HTTP protocol, as well as functioning similar to a short-term BitTorrent swarm.
@CyberVenus
There is no mechanism to search the content hash actually uploaded to ipfs.
So it can’t be downloaded and spread.
If you actually use ipfs, how do you resolve it?
What does expect resolve does ipfs make?
You can’t search the internet either, you go to a web address. With IPFS you go to a file hash. If you’re looking to search IPFS you’d need to utilize some indexed search engine like Google, only for IPFS, I believe there are a couple out there, but I can’t think of what they are right now.
You can take a look at PubSub which allows you to broadcast data (whether it be a file, a new IPNS record, a message,…) to peers who are interested in it. But yes, if noone downloads your file, it will only be on your computer, but I don’t see it as a shortcoming. We don’t want to make peers download and seed files without their consent.
It depends what you mean by search. If you search a website by knowing already what you have to type in the URL bar, then IPFS already does that with mutable links like IPNS or DNSLink. But if you search a website using only keywords, then it becomes complicated. Either you wait that a centralized search engine like Google starts to index IPFS websites, or you develop your own decentralized search engine, like YaCy, or the search engines used for IPFS that crawl the DHT to index new content. But I don’t think a distributed search engine will ever be as efficient as a centralized one, because the latter use gigantic databases called indexes, and with IPFS you would have to download this database in its entirety before using it.
You ask some good questions, satoshi999.
Do you mean the hashes have no obvious meaning? That you can not browse the hashes sensibly, as you would essentially by looking at random things/noise?
I think that some pinning facilities provide a label function which is associated with the hash. Axel does this, if I remember correctly.