This is a fundamental flaw in the web. Since we treat a server's name as authoritative, anybody maintaining a replica needs to repeatedly hit that server to know if their remote version is up to date.
If we trusted digital signatures on content instead of server names, we could have a model where a single bit of server load propagates to millions of interested parties. As it is the server must do something distinct for each interested party.
CDNs mitigate this only partially, because mutable data means they have no good cache invalidation strategy.
There's got to be a solution that doesn't involve heaping even more burdensome requirements on those who would dare to publish.
Content-addressing decouples the hoster from the data itself. Anyone can serve content-addressed data and you can locally verify that you’ve got served the correct bytes. IPFS implements building blocks for such an alternative web.
What irony that this article is about crawling content-addressed data.
Agreed on both points. But it's looking increasingly likely that particular dream is not coming true. Kubo, the reference implementation IPFS node, is maintainerless as of last week.
I'm not sure where IPFS went wrong, but I think our web will continue to degrade until we figure it out. (It'll continue to degrade after that also, but then we can let it burn since we'll have a replacement to switch to).
I think focusing on filecoin was probably the mistake. You've got to build something that people trust first and then consider adding a money-shaped app. If you start with something money-shaped you're indistinguishable from the legions of scams, and that's a hard position to start from if you're wanting to build something trustworthy.
If we trusted digital signatures on content instead of server names, we could have a model where a single bit of server load propagates to millions of interested parties. As it is the server must do something distinct for each interested party.
CDNs mitigate this only partially, because mutable data means they have no good cache invalidation strategy.
There's got to be a solution that doesn't involve heaping even more burdensome requirements on those who would dare to publish.