IPFS and its associated technologies are mostly static. Radicle is an attempt to build a dynamic P2P web on top of IPFS; one which can host applications with the same abilities of the centralized servers of today to receive inputs from various people or sources.
We've encountered a few difficulties in making this work smoothly. IPFS pubsub in particular is quite slow - messages take a few seconds to be received, even for topic-sizes where the number of hops could in theory be quite small. One big advantage for us would be to be able to control the network topology better (to resemble for instance PolderCast). Since for us IPFS data also is more likely to be available from people subscribing to the same topic, this would also increase IPFS efficiency.
A smaller, but presumably easier, improvement would be to allow configuring how pubsub dissemination works. For instance, messages that have been superseded by later ones would not be disseminated. This should also benefit IPNS-over-pubsub.
Another difficulty we've had is having to wait for IPNS/DHT updates in order to consider a write succesful. Non-IPNS-key-owners shouldn't have to wait; better would be if they were given by the key-owner, as a response to writes, the raw content of the DHT update. In our system, that's enough to guarantee that the write will happen (or the key-owner will be caught forking). But we've found no easy way to get that data.
Moreover, ideally we would have a somewhat more pluggable DHT, since for us the entries are either standard signed CIDs (IPNS), or a Merkle proof that the relevant key-owner misbehaved.
Messages should be able to be delivered to well-connected nodes in at most 1 second for topics with under 10 connected subscribers, and at most 5 for ~1000 connected subscribers
It will be helpful to have radicle installed. How to do so is described here
- Radicle website: https://radicle.xyz/
- Radicle repo: https://github.com/radicle-dev/radicle
- PolderCast: https://hal.inria.fr/hal-01555561/document
- Floodsub spec: https://github.com/libp2p/specs/tree/master/pubsub
- Pubsub based on Epidemic Broadcast Trees: https://github.com/libp2p/specs/blob/master/pubsub/gossipsub/episub.md
- Pubsub research: https://github.com/libp2p/research-pubsub
🎤 Slides
- Network overlay isn't ideal for PubSub and other applications. Most obviously, nodes just currently connect to other nodes at random. This means they have to connect to many more nodes to have a high probability of dissemination (compare this to PolderCast), and send and receive more messages.
- There's no obvious way to change overlays, short of forking IPFS or going down to libp2p. Radicle for example would benefit from more of a tree-structure than the ring-structure of PolderCast, since the priorities are: (a) getting the message to a specific node quickly; (b) getting a "large enough" number of other nodes to see the message eventually.
- Messages in PubSub may become outdated. Think of IPNS-over-pubsub - disseminating an update you know is old (because you've seen a newer one) isn't useful. This increases network usage. The problem is compounds (multiplicatively) problem (1).
- Again, there's no easy way to modify this without forking IPFS or going down to libp2p.
It seems IPFS already has a plugin system. It would be interesting to explore a pluggable network overlay, as well as a pluggable generalization of the message dissemination system currently available. (The current one relies on whether a message has been seen before; the obvious generalization is taking a function from message and recent-messages to bool indicating whether the message should be disseminated. This would allow for recency, but also for application-specific validity.)