this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2023
22 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
59197 readers
3095 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
copied from a deleted reddit account, it's quite brilliant :
ELI5: Whole thing kind of works like a virus
So, the client doesn’t know where your file is. They call a primary server for a list of some people connected to the IPFS network, then ask around that list progressively spreading, like a virus transmitting between hosts
Once the “virus” finds the file, it brings it back to the client, stores a copy, and closes the connection. And since the client is now IN the network (knows where some other people are) then in order to retrieve further files they don’t need to use the primary server any more. Also, other clients can now fetch the file from the original client. So every copy makes finding those files faster — like auto scaling.
IPFS built an algorithm around that concept, to make file cleanup, lookup, minimization, and integrity checking possible. They also use a hash ID system to store data so like, if the hashes match, you could get a piece from file A or file B (whichever is closer) to complete the hash sequence needed to build file C.
It’s a pretty clever system, if you’re curious totally worth reading into the details.
It's ludicrously slow.
We're moving that way, we'll get there, we need more nodes everywhere and honestly better distribution flows so it's closer to a multicast system, but that's probably the end goal.