The new iroh-blobs design restores the initial “one unique identifier for each file” ethos of IPFS (abandonned by IPFS), to reduce swarm fragmentation. It takes the standard Blake3 hashing algorithm to generate file CIDs (equivalent to Bittorrent magnet infohash).
The protocol uses the Mainline Bittorrent DHT (not a custom DHT). There is no notion of block CIDs (no potential deduplication, but also less scalability issues for announcing each block CID on the DHT).
So that’s a lot of design simplifications that will improve implementation time.
If you are interested, have a try at Iroh-share, a CLI and TUI Rust implementation.
FWIW, you can access IPFS content with an in-browser IPFS gateway now, so no need to install anything: https://inbrowser.link/
You’ll still need to install something if you want to add/pin content, etc., but the in-browser gateway is convenient for sharing links to IPFS stuff with someone who doesn’t know what IPFS is.
Yes. But relying whole infrastructure on some central gateways goes in the opposite direction of the project goals.
Yeah I think that’s one of the reasons why they made the in-browser gateway. (Also the old http gateway servers mostly sucked)