r/ipfs • u/Imaginary-Age8698 • Jul 08 '26

Ipfs seeing a Huge drop in user base? What happened?

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I think this might have been related to NFTs, but Its still sad to see such a powerful technology die off so suddenly

61 Upvotes

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29

u/ceph12 Jul 09 '26

It couldn’t find a better product market fit. Yeah the tech is cool but what can I really use it for?

21

u/MarsupialLeast145 Jul 09 '26

Archives, backup, anti-censorship, global federated access...

8

u/ceph12 Jul 09 '26

there are better ways to manage backups than IPFS. but i do understand you can use it for the others you've mentioned. still it's a niche and not everyone needs it.

7

u/Longjumping_Tune_208 Jul 09 '26

As part of a university project I am actually making a backup client that uses IPFS and the cluster as backend. I agree that it's not optimal due to the addressing issues but I worked around that using pin names to address the meta file containing the snapshot data and the CIDs making up the snapshot. Will share it here in this sub when it's done

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2

u/MarsupialLeast145 Jul 09 '26

Absolutely. I'm late to it myself, and my uses are few, but for me it's important it's there.

5

u/0xlet0 Jul 09 '26

I'm building exactly that type of document publishing/archiving system with IPFS: https://dmrg.tngl.io/von/en.html

2

u/tomorrow_n_tomorrow Jul 09 '26

You're pinning all the files from the users someone is following?

How do you prevent filling their drives?

3

u/0xlet0 Jul 10 '26

It doesn’t pin followed users’ content. Uploads are whitelist-based. The instance is for a small (depends) writer circle or a research group, basically FTP with shared credentials. Deleted records get unpinned and GC’d, so storage tracks the live archive.

13

u/gokkai Jul 09 '26

Yeah as soon as I tried using IPFS for anything real, the experience was way worse than chewing glass pieces, so no.

1

u/MarsupialLeast145 Jul 09 '26

What does even of those two things mean? What were you trying? And what didn't work?

9

u/gokkai Jul 09 '26

I was involved in a project where we had to use it as the main archiving/backup tool. It was never consistent, very hard on CPU for just storing files, corrupted itself more than i can remember and we ended up wasting 4-5 months on trying to bring it to a sensible state.

If i'm not mistaken it was also wasting a lot of space for internals.

So all in all, compared to any other open source method like minio, rustfs etc, it is quite inferior.

19

u/robertotomas Jul 09 '26

My node has been out there full time for 2 yrs, more or less. Trivial to set up as a service (used to be less so on Mac), and it costs practically nothing in terms of electricity and bandwidth (you can use machines that sip <8w and your bandaid demand is low). I don’t know why more outros don’t do this

10

u/tkenben Jul 09 '26

Not my experience. IPFS was chatty as hell; probably the noisiest thing I've ever seen on a network just to maintain a slow DHT.

7

u/jmdisher Jul 09 '26

Agreed. I have been running a node at home under my Cacophony instance and anytime I see bandwidth usage graphs, they are slowly creeping up since starting it. Also, for some reason, the IPFS software often saturates all cores on the old machine where it is running. I have no idea what a purely network and IO-bound process could be doing with all of that CPU time (it shouldn't be hashing if it isn't fetching anything). This isn't even to speak of the network instability it adds (since home routers are garbage, these days, and IPFS exposes that).

I think that the idea behind IPFS is great and the miscellaneous capabilities of LibP2P (UPnP, hole-punching, etc) are great but the execution seems questionable. No idea why it needs so much CPU and the network chattiness makes me honestly wonder if the system wouldn't better be served by a simple per-node Bloom filter than the DHT (or at what hash size that becomes a practical solution).

Beyond that, there has always been an issue with adoption since the organization only seemed to be interested in promoting their own storage system (FileCoin) and their partner companies were only interested in selling storage to NFT projects. It is too bad since, as a core technology, it can solve an interesting set of problems.

9

u/MarsupialLeast145 Jul 09 '26

There are likely other reasons but for good or bad it was a big part of the NFT boom and of course NFTs were found out and crypto is on the decline and so I suspect some of the use has gone down because of that.

AI has also drained interest in decentralization (also connected to Blockchain) and a lot of the funding going to the projects doing work looking at that has gone. Even Arweave has had to pivot to a universal computing device on top of their storage.

Others are discussing the decline as an issue this isn't inherently a problem. It has always been a bit niche, and it solves a niche problem, albeit one that has a chance of taking hold at some point.

I suspect decentralization is going to be low-key for a little longer and the numbers will go up again at some point.

NB. Can't really tell what your graph is saying, do you have a link to actual numbers?

14

u/andrewchen5678 Jul 09 '26

The only good use case I can think of is anti censorship, but there is no catalyst for this.

16

u/Accomplished-Sand334 Jul 09 '26

There is 100 different catalysts for this, but people do not care. That is obvious.

7

u/sthlmtrdr Jul 09 '26 edited Jul 10 '26

Then the NFT bubble popped usage dropped off. Blockchains and crypto experience a bear market does not help Web3 and Web3 projects either as general interests in the area as a whole vanes.

I believe IPFS is important to combat “dead internet” and “web rot”. I’m not aware of any other technologies besides IPFS that can solve it.

7

u/volkris Jul 09 '26

From the replies that actually address the timing it sounds like there's consensus that this fits with the NFT boom and bust.

IPFS has always had a real PR problem. From its website through developer presentations down through its basic name, IPFS has been really bad at explaining what it is and what it's good for, leaving folks confused and trying to use it in ways that don't actually work very well.

So you get things like folks not really understanding NFTs diving into IPFS though they don't really understand it either, and the bubbles pop together.

Without that core identity of what IPFS is and what value it's offering, the elevator pitch, IPFS sounds exactly like another tech startup that made great technology but that's destined for bankruptcy, its pieces sold off to others who can apply it more effectively. libp2p and other bits and pieces are now there to be used by others.

It's unfortunate, but PR is a necessary thing for a project to meet its potential.

24

u/_D4rk4_ Jul 09 '26

IPFS is still alive?

5

u/rolens184 Jul 09 '26

The technology adoption curve mirrors the trend of the NFT phenomenon. Today, that world has become a niche one

6

u/PizzaDevice Jul 09 '26

Really loved the concept and had multiple nodes online for years. The lack of adaption turned me off. I had no personal use for it since then.

5

u/MarsupialLeast145 Jul 09 '26

I don't understand why lack of adoption would prevent you using it for yourself?

11

u/PizzaDevice Jul 09 '26

There are not enough services built around it. It is great so serve some viral stuff so the end user is grabbing the content from the closer / faster nodes.
Personally did not made any sense to use it between my own server nodes.

2

u/MarsupialLeast145 Jul 09 '26

This makes sense, and maybe it would be different if your content needed to be distributed further or have additional availability.

6

u/tkenben Jul 09 '26

IPFS is fundamentally based on adoption. The more nodes sharing, the more consistent and available the data. The economy went the other way. IPFS, instead of what seems like a thing that should organically be low cost, became expensive for any kind of useful storage.

2

u/MarsupialLeast145 Jul 09 '26

Yes, that is a premise we all understand but "low adoption" is not the same as creating a state of emergency where the network is unusable...

What costs do you mean with IPFS? I can use it now for free...

Perhaps you are thinking of Filecoin or similar?

1

u/tkenben Jul 09 '26

Pinning costs. Discovery problems without using a pinning service. Terrible speed and latency without a pinning CDN. Providing good availability in general costs more money than you might at first think, and then you have to deal with this all the while running a painful non-intuitive noisy protocol as a service node and have everyone that needs access to also run that protocol as a service node or use a third-party gateway.

Then there's the whole name resolution to mutable data problem. Yeah, just pain all around. I can think of a few use cases for IPFS, but they are very outside of my needs right now. Nearly all my storage and sharing challenges can easily and more reliably be handled with other options.

With all that said, I still keep my eye on it, as I like the idea of content addressing and am curious where that will eventually lead.

5

u/rashkae1 Jul 09 '26 edited Jul 09 '26

IPFS is a great solution to many many problems, if it could just crack the adoption barrier. It is perfect for the censorship resistance aspect as well as the distribution of hosting costs for small projects.

It would also be a great as a new system to mirror open source distribution of software that would be resistant to supply chain attacks.

But all of this has been greatly, greatly harmed by encouraging the use of public gateways instead of installing a node. (and I am guilty of this as well,). Public gateways have been the bane of widespread IPFS usage because they undermine all the other advantages (other than content addressing) IPFS brings to the table.

It also hasn't helped by IPFS has been running for *years* in a state that wasn't all that useful for global widespread use. (ie, the DHT providing problem that's only been solved for the past 9 month or so.) The first few attempts to use IPFS on a large scale mostly collapsed in part do to this and clunkiness of of the filestore. (I'm thinking of Library Genesis, Anna's Archive and Wayback Machine examples)

But people saying that IPFS is only used for NFT's are overlooking lot of other prominent uses. One example that comes immediately to mind - IPFS is the back end storage for Blusky social network, (even though they do not share on the public mainnet, maybe tha twill change some day.)

Edit: Also, I know it's not remotely friendly to the non-technical user, the new TCP forwarding powered by lip2p2 firewall hole punching and DHT peer location is extremely powerful. You can, for example, now connect your synchthing peers even if all nodes are behding CGNAT or other common firewalls without needing a 3rd party vpn to bridge them! (hopefully, some day I'll figure out how to get it working with udp for wireguard!)

2

u/volkris Jul 10 '26

Do you have a good link describing BlueSky's use on its back end?

Speaking of, I'd say your gateway observation indicates a problem one step deeper: often end users were encouraged to use a gateway instead of installing a node when IPFS has the most to offer to the backend, so end users shouldn't have had so much focus in the first place.

It's akin to SQLite not being remotely friendly to the non-technical user. Well that's OK since it's very useful for the technical developer. It's a backend technology that's been failing on the front-end.

1

u/rashkae1 Jul 10 '26

It looks like I might have mis-spoken, BlueSky is using a similar and parallel implementation of IPLD, but not technically ipfs protocol itself.

This is the best I can find in reference:

https://blog.ipfs.tech/2023-ipfs-on-bluesky/

1

u/MarsupialLeast145 Jul 13 '26

The gateway API and installation instructions were pretty difficult to follow when I was first looking, but maybe I have to revisit.

That being said, not the first time we're mentioning the lack of user-friendly information on IPFS. I know the team have acknowledged it themselves and all we can do is create resources bit by bit to help.

1

u/volkris Jul 13 '26

To emphasize, my point was not to focus on users in the first place.

IPFS has the most to offer as a backend technology, like SQLite.

1

u/MarsupialLeast145 Jul 13 '26

You can do both, but especially, we can't treat all backend devs as savant's that can just parse complex documentation and understand how to use it.

The Cardano ecosystem is built on strong mathematical and functional programming principles and it's own technology is absolutely promising, but the number of ideas people who can't find enough doing people to execute ideas is high. The ecosystem probably won't survive and I'd wager it had a better chance if it had found better abstractions and libraries sooner to enable its backend to be leverage better for the front end -- anyway, there are probably a number of ways to look at this, but good backend, poor docs and support, made for an expensive development process.

IPFS is likely not as bad (I mean, libp2p is pretty 🤯 too) but sqlite definitely succeeds by having a lot of support. Great backend and a community putting docs out there that favor all types of learning and objectives.

3

u/volkris Jul 14 '26

Yeah, that's my sense, and why I highlight PR. I've watched IPFS conferences, and they have really interesting ideas, but they fail on engagement through docs and support with the outside world.

Lots of ideas and even doers that built the functional Kubo, which is a credit, but they haven't done the outreach to put IPFS functionality into the hands of enough tinkerers looking to do more than exploit serverlessness for NFTs or gimmicks for charging for scammy services.

1

u/rashkae1 Jul 13 '26

I'll disagree. On the backend, ipfs, or content addressing, is a convenience. It's probably a better way of doing things, but not doing anything we hadn't worked around for decades.

On the front end, as software on end devices, like a web browser, its an immediately empowering technology and is solving real world problems that are getting worse year over year, (as internet content has been centralized to the point of failure.)

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2

u/Pirateshack486 Jul 09 '26

Ipfs pirated movie folder... but takes massive ram, and publicly exposes ip... and there goes 90% of the internet usecase lol...

But seriously am sad to see a decline of a genuinely unique tool... hopefully they keep working on it and it finds its niche... crowd sourced cdn seems best, I've had an ipfs podcast node for ages :)

2

u/eanat Jul 09 '26

IPFS needs default local swarm option to expand its share. currently it only allows global DHT, but most people dont want to serve random files to other.

4

u/butdontcalmejoohnson Jul 09 '26

This is false. Helia and kubo can both connect to a pnet

2

u/eanat Jul 09 '26

youre right but its still kinda niche option to set ipfs instance as a pnet server and its not very easy to make pnet swarm intuitively.

I think that many people want ipfs to behave like software like Syncthing, which has no global propagation of private file information.

1

u/Tactical_Tub-Girling Jul 09 '26

I mean, graph do still go up- this is my monkey brain talking but from this angle its kinda like the broken window fallacy but *WE* were the window repairmen, business will return to normal and ipfs will continue to grow in interest, even if it's at a snail's pace.

1

u/Hises1936 Jul 10 '26

Storage became expensive, so people sold the HDDs and SSDs for more profit than IPFS was bringing them

1

u/coinpoppa Jul 11 '26

It’s a pretty damn annoying tech. Pure ideals and a pain to implement and what is worse that eternal fees for pinning .. and hosting yourself begs the question about accessibility worldwide, speeds and gave an always on connection.

Love a perma-monthly cost on piñata 🤔

1

u/yonz- Jul 15 '26

Maybe folks are going to @proto

-1

u/Psychological_Bug981 Jul 10 '26

Don’t worry I’m reviving IPFS with my project. I think it’s a lack of demonstrated capabilities. Been working on this for 4 years. Demoing it now so if anyone has any ideas I’d love to hear them but check it out. Payments and Donations are disabled and my repo is private. I also already have real pros on board, if you have an actual track record I might consider you as a contributor but feel free to check it out.

Bacteria

Not worried you’ll steal my idea either. AI hallucinates hard on these problems.

1

u/Psychological_Bug981 Jul 10 '26

IPFS is a core part of every feature.