
Ask HN: What are some of the gripes you have with IPFS? - orthecreedence
I&#x27;ve seen a lot of posts come up where IPFS is mentioned and someone chimes in and says they don&#x27;t like the choices they made or how the network is run, but I haven&#x27;t seen many people go into great detail. I&#x27;m curious what these problems are and why they&#x27;re important.<p>I&#x27;m really interested in using IPFS for one of my projects and all I really know about it are the good things.
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momack2
IPFS person here. I can relate some frustrations / concerns that people
sometimes have with IPFS - and happy to also chat about your specific use case
and whether IPFS is a good fit!

1\. network performance / reliability / scalability The IPFS network grew 30x
in 2019, and because of that we've had some performance challenges -
especially around resolving niche content via the DHT / handling NATs. We're
working on fixes and improvements here, but for applications that require
_extremely fast_ response times there are some work-arounds (like directly
connecting to known relay nodes / swarm connecting your peers) to get around
these issues.

2\. access controls / reader-writer privacy Right now access controls live a
layer above IPFS - and IPFS doesn't support any out of the box encryption /
privacy preservation (coming from it's origins helping replicate public
datasets like wikipedia and scientific data). There are some groups like
Peergos, Textile, and OpenBazaar which have invested in building these
controls and privacy preserving approaches (like a tor transport for IPFS) -
but we'd still recommend folks to be very careful when using IPFS (especially
the public DHT) for highly sensitive tasks.

3\. extremely large data One of our foci with our "package manager" goal for
this year is to make it fast to add TBs of data to IPFS. Right now, depending
on folder structure that can take a long time (hours) =/

4\. "out of the box" website support While there are lots of simple tutorials
for putting a static site on IPFS, many website-building frameworks don't
write relative links in a way that meshes with "anyone can provide this
content" (aka relative urls get wonky). Hugo is a notable exception, and we're
working on creating tooling to support other frameworks like vuepress too.
IPNS being too slow to resolve is also a complaint for sites that want to
regularly update to a newer hash. We have dual track improvements on this -
both a new version of IPNS over pubsub that is less reliant on slow DHT
lookups, and making DHT lookups faster in general for all requests - but the
other workaround is to update dns directly using dnslink - which seems to work
for most folks.

Check out [https://awesome.ipfs.io/](https://awesome.ipfs.io/) for the sorts
of projects that people are building on IPFS today!

~~~
karmakaze
Thanks for the great recap on the state of IPFS. I wasn't aware of continued
progress on these fronts and it seems much closer to being generally useful
than I would have guessed. In particular (2) & (4) getting better but not
realizing that adoption was creating it's own issue (1).

