From December to Janurary I was working on my own project that was meant to prototype a IPNS pinning service. This is a super useful tool for the community because IPNS provides your own “permanent” address for you to store your content at. I started this project because I thought it would be a great way to create dynamic NFTs. You just keep the IPNS hash in the contract and change everything off chain. Obviously theres a LOT of edge cases to make that possible, but we’re not here to talk about that. . Another use case is the decentralized, updateable website. There are IPFS pinning services that are massively popular. All while IPFS maxis are annoyed of the centralization, so why can’t there be one for IPNS records?
These are just some of those resources that gave me a complete picture of the problems with IPNS library and why it is so important to have a pinning service for ipns records available:
TLDR; Jorropo suggests two distinct features, IPNS following & IPNS republishing, users want from an ipns pinning service that will enable a complete picture of having your data available while a user goes offline.
Keep others’ IPNS records alive · Issue #1958 · ipfs/go-ipfs (github.com)
TLDR; We find out for the first time what’s the reasoning behind records expiring. Its for protection against replay attacks and then the question is posed, Is it worse to have no data at all or outdated data, [assuming no replay attack has occured]?
TLDR; The reason is network discovery. The problem is the exipration time of 24 hrs, no “ipns pinning service”, and the same problem with IPFS. If there isn’t that many people hosting the data, then it can’t be found very easily.
Confusion about IPNS - Help - discuss.ipfs.io
TLDR; One of the IPNS guys at PL tells us that the DHT is the problem and we find out what IPRS is, and that it is still WIP, but aims to solve a problem of IPNS. It is the longest read on this list.
IPNS Overview and FAQ (notion.site)
TLDR; A more recent overview of IPNS by one of the core PL devs. He explains problems with IPNS in js-ipfs. My biased take away was that he was basically helping to outline problems to solve to create an ipns pinning service.
on the summaries!