#ipld — Public Fediverse posts

@agowa338 "self-distract". lol. I can't say for real because i'm just getting into #ipfs and formal local-first, but I've found quite a few videos about #ipfs #ipns #ipld on youtube. published in the last 5 years or so.

You might want to check out https://www.inkandswitch.com You probably heard of them but i wanted to post it for completeness' sake.

@DimlyLitCorners got some updates from #IPFS leadership on BlueSky:

The crypto algorithm that IPFS uses for public keys and signing mutable names in #IPNS is getting added to #WebCryptography https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/blink-dev/c/T2kriFdjXsg/m/ZeD_PoLXBwAJ?pli=1

There is a draft spec for CBOR which IPFS uses to store structured data int he #IPLD graph https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-caballero-cbor-cborc42/

They are discussing it at the #IETF meeting this week in Spain

It seems they are breaking IPFS up into smaller pieces to get it through standards bodies more easily!

starting with research data is a constrained problem to get some of the fundamentals of data structures, transport, and interop down so that in the next phase we can build identity, peer federation, and communication on top of that. we want to be able to handle bigg blobs of bits as well as liddel messages, and so making a p2p transport layer for RDF-like things leads naturally into the second phase goal of bridging the fediverse which runs on #JSONLD to p2p.

I still am not committed to actually building for RDF, want to learn from prior art without being weighed down by 20+ years of convoluted technical history, but there is a lot to learn about linking graphs there. I think one of the main things I am uncommitted to is needing globally unique URIs for everything, rather than having some things uniquely identifiable (eg. a dataset, a post) with relative locations for other things. That way you can make containers for encryption - peers can refer to the content hash of the encrypted subgraph as location for querying, zero-knowledge mirroring, etc. as well as opaque references to the graph content itself for peers that can decrypt it, but those inner-locations can't be resolved by peers that can't decrypt.

that is still a very unfinished thought, but it's a big missing piece in related technologies like #IPFS where everything must be addressable by CID. its arguably the need that #IPNS and #IPLD are intended to backfill

ok so re-reading #IPFS paper and there are a few things I think in retrospect are undesirable about the #MerkelDAG spec. it's hard to parse them out as separable ideas because they depend on one another, but the main thing I think is how it conflates the structure of a metadata graph, the content of the graph, and the notion of authorship/identity.

In (basic) IPFS, each node contains some data and some links. the data is some unspecified binary blob, the links are all references to hashes of other nodes, and then the hash of all that identifies the node. There are some abstractions like flattened trees that can represent n-depth links, but that's the gist. I'm refreshing myself, so correct me where I'm wrong.

This makes traversing the graph expensive from a naive (cacheless) state- you have to fetch each node and parse its links serially, and since there isn't a notion of authorship except when used to sign a node, you might have to do the resolution process across a lot of the network instead of being able to say "ah ok this is from this identity so I should ask their neighborhood first"

Since the links are untyped, and because of the need for serial resolution, you can't really "plan" queries and move the query logic to the "edges" (in a networking, rather than graph parlance) of the network - the network resolution logic handles all that.

This structure also makes it so you can't "talk about" a node. A node contains its links. The links are directional, so I could make some statement about a node by pointing to it, but I can't, as a third party make a link under my identity, separate from the author and content of the node, that points from some object to another. That makes the network more like a hard drive than a social space.

Further, since links aren't typed, you have to move that metadata inside the node. This makes you need to re-hash each node more than you need to, and since "keys" for identifying different fields in the node aren't themselves links, you can't have any notion of "schema" where a term can be reused. So there isn't really a facility for being able to do graph queries like "find me this type of data whose field has this value" which restricts a whole huge range of possibilities too long to list here. This also makes knowing what the binary data inside a node is potentially impossible without out of band info, depending on how it's encoded. #IPLD and #Multiformats are intended to solve this, post-hoc.

I'll stop there for now, and save what I think could be a different model for later, but I am thinking along the lines of merging with #LinkedData #Triplets , encoding the notion of authorship into links (so that links can have an "utterance" rather than "fact" ontological status), a notion of container/contained for explicit block formation and metadata separation, and formalizing the notion of orthogonal Merkel DAGs to change the points where the content addressing happens to be able to have "graph subunits" that allow for cycles at a "complete" scope but for the purposes of hashing have no cycles. very much #WIP, still at conceptual stage haven't started writing spec yet.

#LongPost #p2p #WorkingInPublic

It's been great working with @b_fiive & the @qri_io team on the #WNFS and #UCAN specs.

Encrypted files on @IPFS, with a number of other interesting properties :P
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RT @qri_io
A presentation & demo of our plan to use our new @golang implementation of @FISSIONcodes's WebNative Filesystem Version 2 in @qri_io:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hum5vfaQ9e8

#golang #IPFS #filesystem #WNFS #web3 #distributedweb #IPLD #datacatalog #linkeddata #…
https://twitter.com/qri_io/status/1470786956917420037