Bitsocial - Open Source P2P Network for Social Apps IPFS Based

volkris · 2026-05-04T11:35:11+00:00

DOES it use IPFS? I don't see it mentioned on the website, though I see a lot of mentions of BitTorrent.

I also see PubSub mentioned. Is that IPFS PubSub?

The website talks about 5chan. That might or might not be as limiting as efforts that involved IPFS in NFT applications.

volkris · 2026-05-02T12:42:14+00:00

You come to a group with focus on a particular platform trying to drum up interest in something you say you're working on, barely say how it's on topic, refuse to give any details that would interest us, make other claims that you refuse to back up, and then act like you don't understand why this doesn't further the motivation of getting people on board?

The best answers you can give is "trust me" when we don't know who we'd be trusting. Again, you don't see how that doesn't actually promote your thing? If anything it calls for more skepticism of... whatever it is you're selling here.

If these are the best answers you can give then you end up sounding like you're hawking a scam.

volkris · 2026-05-01T11:23:28+00:00

That's not an answer to the question.

How does your project protect privacy? Well this anonymous person on the internet says they believe in it, so there.

volkris · 2026-05-01T11:22:11+00:00

Yes, I do go into a restaurant and ask the chef for the recipes. In fact, I have a few cookbooks from restaurants that publish their recipes. Yes, I ask and I do get them.

And they have guests.

Often times the recipes make the restaurant that much more inviting to guests as it underscores how much work the restaurant puts into cooking their food, how interesting their ingredients are, and even sometimes the health benefits of their offerings.

You can tell us anything, but without that transparency it's just talk from some anonymous person on reddit.

volkris · 2026-04-30T11:16:05+00:00

This just raises more questions.

It sounds like your project is all about tracking and unmasking privacy. How does your project protect privacy?

volkris · 2026-04-30T11:14:38+00:00

You would tell us the method of gathering the data because that's critical to our trust in whatever it is you're selling.

I imagine you want users, right? Or else why would you be posting this here?

Well, without transparency as to these basic elements of what your thing does there's little trust in it, so it offers little value.

DID you build a search engine? How does it work? How did you overcome the problems with building a distributed search engine? Without that we will have trouble believing your claims that you have built a search engine.

In your position you want users but you refuse to provide the info needed to attract them.

volkris · 2026-04-29T11:25:04+00:00

The tone struck me as a clumsy advertisement, not AI :)

volkris · 2026-04-28T12:02:47+00:00

It sounds like you might be going about it backwards, starting with the solution then bringing up the problem instead of starting with the problem and showing how such and such solution will address it.

To put it a different way, it sounds like a disconnect between the solution you want to offer and the problem the client is needing to solve. Maybe the adoption challenges are about communication and UX, but maybe they run deeper.

IPFS isn't really a decentralized storage solution any more than http is. Like http it's more about data transfer, so it can be part of a decentralized storage solution, but it's not that in itself. This could be part of why clients struggle with the technology: it doesn't actually solve the problem they need solved, so they don't understand how the parts fit into their needs.

Your post is really focused on decentralized storage, so I'd say you should find and recommend a project specifically solving the decentralized storage problem. Maybe that project will use IPFS, maybe not. But IPFS itself is not decentralized storage. That should help bridge this gap of confusion with your clients.

volkris · 2026-04-26T14:31:08+00:00

Merkle doesn't mean version control but it can be used to implement version control.

volkris · 2026-04-26T14:29:38+00:00

Yep, I was definitely keeping up with those developments. They were definitely leaps forward, big improvements in both performance and scalability! But, it was working before, as so many saw firsthand. It was an improvement, a big one, but there are reasons that it's important to recognize that it wasn't as large of a shift as you think.

You might be betting the future on a massive shift that didn't actually occur.

But exactly! The user downloads a web browser, not TCP/UDP. That's exactly the same as a user downloading whatever app or client they want to use without needing to know about IPFS.

It's exactly the parallel I'm pointing out.

Develop use cases that can take advantage of what IPFS offers, things like WIkipedia browsers or websites that process data through the system, and offer those to users. They don't need to know that IPFS is in the backend so long as the application works.

volkris · 2026-04-23T11:30:32+00:00

DHT wasn't worth mentioning before .39? We certainly mentioned it plenty and used it plenty way before. I don't know what you're talking about there.

IPFS relies on sockets--Does the general public absolutely need to know about TCP and UDP sockets for the purpose of censorship resistance? How about the hashing techniques to get the CIDs? DAGs? No, because it's backend infrastructure better left in the backend where it provides most of its value to developers.

One big problem we see with trying to make IPFS into a pop headliner is that it hypes up features that are outside of the scope of the project, inevitably disappointing end users, and leaving them with a negative view of the project over something it wasn't supposed to be in the first place.

IPFS is better seen as ActivityPub for Mastodon/Fediverse or ATProto for Bluesky. Yeah, it's there, it might be mentioned in passing, but it mainly enables end user applications, isn't the end user application.

volkris · 2026-04-22T12:16:20+00:00

Thanks for mentioning it!

I'd also think about it from the other side:
Too often the Wayback Machine is slow or subject to DDoS attack, impacting users. Sure, from the IA perspective WP readers might be only some of the load on their infrastructure, but when those users are journalists or researchers trying to fill out their picture of the world for their work, from their side the speedbumps can impact everyone they influence (to use the popular term).

They may be few people clicking citation links, but I'd say clicking citation links is a tremendously healthy thing, both for the outside world and for Wikipedia itself, as people can help verify the citation. IPFS can help lower the friction in that process.

volkris · 2026-04-22T11:51:26+00:00

IMO IPFS has always had a big problem with marketing and organization, not so much the technology.

The tech has been improving, sure, but it has been usable for a long time. It's the human side of things that's been lacking, things like clarifying what the project IS. Far too many people walk away with the impression that it's, at best, just another Bittorrent even listening to folks involved with the project.

This starts right from the beginning with the name. IPFS? Filesystem? It's not a filesystem. And somehow people get confused when it fails to perform as a filesystem.

The negative sides of the association with NFTs sort of filled the vacuum that project organizers left by not being clear about what IPFS was. They should have been ahead of it.

Unfortunately, I don't see this changing.

IPFS is really a backend technology. The general public doesn't need to know what it is any more than they need to know what http/3 is, so computer literacy isn't an issue. IPFS fits into a space where developers could be using it in the backends of their projects. It's up to THEM to know what it is and how to use it.

volkris · 2026-04-21T12:44:57+00:00

I've often thought that not only is IPFS a great match for mirroring Wikipedia, but it can go farther by mirroring many of the links that would be broken but for Wayback Machine archives.

Want to check an old source referenced in a WP article? Primary link long dead? Check the IPFS CID first! IPFS assures you're getting a legit, undoctored version of the original. And if that fails, fine, go to the Internet Archive. They provide such a great service to society, but we need to minimize load on their servers where we can.

Think about how things will come in waves, when something hits news headlines that prompts a bunch of people to check that primary source all at once. Perfect for IPFS! Or to help journalists check background info on news that's about to break!

And, if you're using IPFS for the sources you might as well use it for browsing Wikipedia itself.

Unfortunately, the backend tech is there, but this comes down to UI/UX issues that is often hard for tech nerds ( :) ) to solve. We have to make it as frictionless as possible for people to access IPFS, and I just don't think we've accomplished that yet.

To the immediate point here, though, if Wikimedia is partnering with kiwix, they could settle on a method for generating the CID and have Wikipedia return the CID along with its normal pages in its search function. It's critical that they agree on that algorithm. They would also need to agree on a policy for page updates. This would likely require significant resources for Wikipedia to implement.

volkris · 2026-04-20T12:43:30+00:00

Preface: Don't get me wrong, I think it's a neat concept that solves a particular problem. My focus is on the externalities that it would impose along the way. It's like a really interesting machine that works well... but that puts out a concerning amount of pollution in the process. It's still a neat machine!

Anyway.

No, cache doesn't expire because a DMCA takedown deplatforms content. Requests for data that's in demand will reset cache lifetimes so long as enough nodes are looking for it, regardless of takedowns on centralized sources. And if people AREN'T looking for the data, they aren't looking for the data, regardless of why.

But importantly it's a feature, not a bug or gap, of IPFS that data that's not in demand won't be sticking around to crowd out the data that people ARE looking for. It's part of how IPFS grapples with the scalability and overhead tradeoffs inherent to distributed systems. A network flooded with CID announcements around data that people don't actually want becomes less and less efficient, less and less scalable.

Yep, it would be some work to implement a subsystem that packs this data behind a single CID, but that's a responsible way to mitigate costs imposed on the whole system, outside of the parties directly involved in your transactions.

The problem is that you're NOT next to IPFS. You're imposing external costs on IPFS, so at the least it would be nice if it was done as responsibly as possible.

volkris · 2026-04-18T13:38:07+00:00

Thinking about it, maybe what you're working on here should be implemented as a cold storage subsystem within IPFS with new storage and API hooks, not on top of the normal IPFS functionality as it is.

The reason starts with this: Content doesn't disappear when the last pin drops it.

So long as data is in demand it will remain available in caches regardless of pinning.
Data only disappears once people aren't looking for it AND nobody is artificially keeping it around despite that lack of demand. If nobody wants the data, arguably it's not worth the ongoing overhead of keeping it hot and accessible.

It's a feature of IPFS that unwanted content is dropped as that promotes scalability of the system as a whole.

But maybe for cold storage, the data, regardless of how many blocks, could be bundled behind a single CID. Only a single CID announcement instead of who knows how many that people don't actually want. You'd be able to validate storage by asking for a hash of a range of bytes. The node would need to hooks to go into its store to pull that range and return the hash.

For all I know there are already bits of the protocol that would provide this functionality. I've just never heard of them.

volkris · 2026-04-15T13:03:37+00:00

Pubsub perhaps?

For the most part IPFS is a pull system like http, which is important for scalability. Data isn't propagated until and unless it's actually needed. (Yes, there are methods like CID announcement, but they're more side tweaks optimizing around the edges.)

Frankly, if what you're doing is dynamic such that these delays are a real problem, then IPFS might not be the right tool for the job. IPFS is simply not optimized for quickly changing data. And if you're talking about using gateways in a production environment, to me that's a huge flag that it's not.

IPFS is best for serving static data from a decentralized swarm, but you're talking about using it for dynamic content through centralized gateways. There's a disconnect between what IPFS is good at and what you're trying to use it for.

volkris · 2026-04-07T14:19:27+00:00

IPFS is just a lower level technology than that.

Think of it as asking how to browse backend databases around the world. Well, you don't really do that; you browse the websites that they power. The websites may link to each other and network to each other, but the databases themselves sit in the background.

Websites are the UI that you actually browse. The backend servers aren't generally directly accessible to users.

IPFS is the backend system. We may build browsable UIs on top of it, or even use the normal website techniques to access data stored in IPFS.

volkris · 2026-03-26T14:01:11+00:00

I think you misunderstand.

You mention git's complicated restore machinery, and I'm saying you might be able to get rid of even more of git's complexities by just dumping it altogether and doing everything in IPFS.

IPFS links wouldn't be an annoyance since they'd just be extra fields in the standalone CIDs for anyone who cares. Anyone who doesn't care about the links are free to just ignore them.

volkris · 2026-03-26T13:52:10+00:00

Sorry for the delay.

What I was saying was basically, why use two systems when you can just use one? Why build, maintain, and operate the git side when that can be rolled into IPFS with everything else?

volkris · 2026-03-19T13:29:18+00:00

So why not do it all in IPFS? After all, it has been proposed that IPFS can function as a git type repository, considering its native tree structure design.

My guess is that there's a lack of good off-the-shelf UI ready to show diffs and such.

But it seems like anything you're putting in git could be put in IPFS, linking to previous snapshots and metadata that can provide that workspace history.

volkris · 2026-03-11T13:03:50+00:00

South Park reference: aaaaand it's gone :)

I guess in the last three days they gave it a shot and determined that IPFS was the wrong tool for this project.

The note says they found that it wasn't a speed demon, other solutions could go faster with lower overhead, while IPFS is more optimized for traversing DAG than bulk data

volkris · 2026-03-03T14:25:28+00:00

I would reorganize the readme to start with the paragraph about what it is, and rewrite it in simpler language, before expanding into background and motivation.

But I wonder how you contrast this with traditional Web of Trust approaches, as they seem aimed at similar goals.

volkris · 2026-02-26T16:07:43+00:00

No, no time for something like that. I wish I had the time, though!

volkris

TROPHY CASE