There is something to be said about the shooting star projects in the open source world. The kind of projects that somehow get better and better, and yet don't rely on crazy funding. Like 7zip, for example.
But they are the exception that cements the overall rule.
I think I first heard of IPFS back in the Steem days, maybe around the time DTube came about, maybe earlier, but not by much. I thought the idea was amazing back then, and although I did not grasp it completely, my participation in torrents made it somewhat understandable.
Seems obvious to me, even more so as I've gotten to play with IPFS for going on two years now, that although the promise is excellent, there are definite pitfalls we can't ignore forever.
The short of it is this:
IPFS has a scaling problem.
A small project, like storing NFTs for a game, seems to be the ideal use case. But I think all of us wanted, and I include myself here, for IPFS to rival industry standards. To stand toe to toe with S3, with AWS-type solutions.
Sadly, and I mean this sincerely, the biggest player in the game, the one company that figured out how to build a giant business model on top of IPFS, Pinata, is only able to do so because they are blending IPFS technology with centralized solutions.
To call Pinata IPFS is to describe half of it, and thus they prove my point yet again.
Now, it might be obvious to some, but it's worth mentioning that their solution to this scalability problem is proprietary. It's not like I can email them and get them to share their private repos with me.
But it's not too hard to imagine how they've solved it.
What is hard is building something like this from scratch.
Yes, even today with AI capabilities in play.
I'm sharing this because I think we are reaching a pivotal moment on 3speak.tv. Seems to me that some big changes have to happen, and somewhat soon too. More so if we want to move towards the big audiences.
Add to this little rant of mine the fact that Shipyard, the team who was behind the maintenance of IPFS' ecosystem, just called it quits.
I think the path forward is unavoidable.
After all, as I said in the beginning, there are only a handful of projects with tiny, decentralized, unfunded teams that actually deliver the goods.
And building on top of wishful thinking seems irresponsible.
MenO