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ipfs
specs
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ipfs / specs

specs

Technical specifications for the IPFS protocol stack

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Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
11Distinct people
17Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
1.2KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Technical specifications for the IPFS protocol stack

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 4:00:59 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year17 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2015-04-04 20:01:13 UTC to 2023-06-26 03:04:45 UTC.

0123452015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 0 submissions, 4 comments20152016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 5 mentions; 0 submissions, 5 comments2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 0 submissions, 4 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments20192020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2023

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC404
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC505
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC404
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

3 sources
whyrusleeping·Jun 12, 2019
Hey there! I’m one of the first developers to work on IPFS, and was the maintainer of the project for around three years. I’ve since been pulled into working on Filecoin, which has definitely taken away from the time I can spend pushing IPFS forward. That said, the IPFS Project has a really solid team and OSS community still pushing the project forward, and there is an entire team working on just libp2p (the network stack used by IPFS and other projects like Livepeer, Ethereum 2.0, OpenBazaar, and more). There’s been a ton of progress made recently, and the network has grown significantly. We’ve gone from nearly 30k peers last year (this is hard to estimate accurately, but best guess) to around 400k peers on the network today — roughly 13x growth. This massive influx in usage has taken a lot of our attention up, things catching fire that
Read the rest
we didn’t expect to catch fire, and other bugs popping up that need to be fixed now. All this detracts our attention from things like docs and website publishing, but we recognize it’s a really important area we need to make time for and step things up. For example, there’s an overhaul of ipfs-cluster docs: https://github.com/ipfs/ipfs-cluster-website/issues/89#issue... We also put a lot of effort into our new docs website: https://docs.ipfs.io/ And we’ve been pushing a lot of specs for everything we build: https://github.com/libp2p/specs https://github.com/ipfs/specs https://github.com/filecoin-project/specs https://github.com/ipld/specs
In IPFS, Again
willglynn·Jun 12, 2019
IPFS also needlessly rolled their own TLS replacement: https://github.com/ipfs/specs/issues/29 > I would add that if TLS can be used without all the X.509 nonsense, and with our own choice of pubkeys, including using different signing public keys (not the DHE keys) in the same conn, then we can consider breaking our "not TLS pls" stance. TLS fit their requirements all along, they just… decided to reinvent it instead of reading about how to use it.
In IPFS, Again
mdaniel·Apr 12, 2019
> how would you implement a Hacker News style aggregator that updates every minute AIUI, that's the problem that IPNS is designed to solve (https://github.com/ipfs/specs/blob/master/naming/README.md#i...). HN controls its private key, enabling it to be the only one who can update the record at the signature of its public key, and those IPNS records have nanosecond precision expiry timestamps and TTLs, meaning they can update at the frequency of their choice I agree with the sibling comments that (at least as the IPFS is currently specified) having a user session would be problematic. It's theoretically possible that _your_ HN front page would have an IPNS record of IPFS://mdaniel.news.ycombinator.com and then we're back to the aforementioned expiry semantics. Upvotes would have to travel out of the IPFS network, but in some sense, I think
Read the rest
that's expected since one wouldn't want an upvote to be archived, but rather the resulting content to be There are a ton of weird perspective changes when thinking about the content addressable web, but it might not be the 2050-esque far away that it seems
In IPFS Project Roadmap

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