I’ve been investigating distributed (and often decentralized) file and file storage systems for quite a while and have run across this name a few times. I only recently took a closer look at it. Although it appeared to have some steam in it 9-10 years ago, it’s been fairly quiet since then. I’m looking for commentary on the current state and any use cases where it’s been used.
Never heard of it, what was it supposed to do specifically I mean?
Shameless plug:
If you want another unknown check out tenfingers it’s my little baby :-)
Cheers
Is tenfingers open source? What does it do?
Yes it’s FOSS and in short, it’s a decentralised, encrypted, takedown-safe hosting protocol and implementation based on reciprocal sharing.
You share my file, I’ll share yours. No crypto money, no complex installations, no need for benevolent nodes to be shared.
With redundancy (10 times by default), your data is “always” accessible, and as the data is encrypted, nodes doesn’t know what they share.
You can give someone the “link file” and they can download your file, or check out if your website have been updated today for example (you can share files or folders, and update them). There are a lot of possibilities IMO, for example I have a prototype chat program based on it, crude but working.
The setup needs a port forwarded to the PC (Linux or Windows, guess you can run the python code directly on Mac too) hosting the program and that’s about it.
FYI I’m doing a security overhaul (there were some nitty gritty stuff with the AES mode, fixed now but not yet published) and I have to dive down the crypto world to check out a last thing. So the next version will break compatibility of the old network which is sadly about non existent ^^ but you can check it out by starting a node or three to see how it communicates.
In the future I’d like to add a browser extension so that you can make a website to host all your stuff with tenfinger links. And parallel downloading. And polish things up.
If you have any questions, feel absolutely free to ask whatever it might be :-) !
BTW I’d love having some place where I can publish my stuff, hang out, take fearlture requests, etc. I’m not very good at getting the word out :-)
Cheers
From wiki it seems like IPFS with extra steps. The website is still up: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs Git repo is still available: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/browser latest commit was 4 days ago. So it seems still available.
Simply put, they could not turn it into a profitable business, so it eventuelly dwindled and activity died down.
It has a design with a challenging point: Even though the files are sort of stored centralized, access happens through a central gateway. That means a) access is rather slow, so it’s more of a cold storage solution and b) if you have a lot of congruent access, which will happen quickly in larger orgs, than the gateway needs to he respectively powerful with relatively large storage by its own. Those point made it rather inflexible in usage while being rather complex to setup.