alt Hacker NewsThis is really unfortunate. When cloudflare dropped IPFS you could say this next step was sort of already on the way. I may be biased but I think when IPFS decided to put so much time into "IPNS" in order to support non-static webapps years ago what they came up with did not fit the need. And without webapps on IPFS things were going nowhere.
A year or so ago I wrote IPFS-boot which allows serving webapps on IPFS while providing also an update path and without breaking content hashing:
https://github.com/rhodey/IPFS-boot
But now if you want to serve a secure webapp and not use IPFS IMO the only option you have is to tell users to install Tailscale and to host the webapp themselves and then to install Tailscale on all devices.
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I agree that IPNS has always seemed a bit naff; but alternatives naming systems can be used too (if your system's name resolver can understand them); e.g. this uses pkarr addresses for IPFS content: http://www.chriswarbo.net/blog/2026-05-08-pkdnslink.html
Regarding an "update path", GNS has support for that built-in; though I've not been able to try it myself, since I can't get GNUNet to bootstrap :-(
I see this very similar to IPv4 and IPv6, and adoption. Non content addressable URL addressing simply is "good enough" for most use cases, and bittorrent is "good enough" for serving content durably and somewhat in a content addressable manner (file hashes, magnet torrents, immutable torrents). Do we need IPFS URLs? It doesn't appear so, it seems like a solution seeking a problem. IPFS gateways will always be a target for abuse and copyright claims as well.
If you want to reference resources securely, https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Security/Defens... is available and widely supported.
Why do you need Tailscale?
Edit: Okay, so a couple of people have downvoted but no-one has answered.
Why would you use tailscale to secure a web app?
oh man and when Brave removed native IPFS support. https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/37735