RE: [Streemian] Automatic IPFS upload bot
I believe that we need to add a new feature. The ability to post a comment whose author can disable the potential for payouts and / or replies. So long as a comment has the potential for a payout the post must be displayed.
I love this kind of innovation and service. I think we could really take this to the next level if you offered the ability to fetch the image from the URL. Then steemit.com could simply point at:
https://yourdomain.com/image?u=imgs.xkcd.com/comics/exploits_of_a_mom.png
This would enable non IPFS images to be used.
Also, I think some of that data is redundant (ipfs-hash and ipfs.pics) so you may want to save blockchain space.
As a community we can archive all images on IPFS by hosting IPFS nodes that white list images on Steem with positive upvotes. In this way the IPFS hosting providers can be protected from child porn and other illegal images by the Steem curation process.
Constructing such a general urlrewrite an using it to automatically store stuff on steemit is not a problem to do.
The issue is (as you know) the content delivery. BUT, we could build a network of IPFS content delivery networks that can be instantly replaced or load balanced if we had the IPFS-hash already. If steemit.com allowed to upload pictures, you would have that hash and could seed the file in the IPFS network.
This is how I think it can be done:
~[ipfs:HASH]<a>tag withhreftohttps://mirror-providerA.steemit.com/?=HASHWell, incentivise people to host IPFS nodes is not easy (as you know) .. no money involved :(
I guess you could ask witnesses to host such nodes. They already kind of have to host a seed node, why not ask an IPFS node from them too? At the moment, the pay largely compensates for it. More generally, I believe that a network supporting a DAO will need various types of specialized nodes to efficiently provide the functionality offered by the DAO, and this should be payed by the network itself. We already have witness nodes, seed nodes, now IPFS nodes, I can see more popping up in the future. I'm sure we can find a way to pay for all of them while avoiding abuse / theft of funds at the same time.
How about a Steem plugin for browsers?
They could simply try to fetch
https://yourdomain.com/ipfs?u=imgs.xkcd.com/comics/exploits_of_a_mom.png(note the
ipfs)and the service would simply return the IPFS hash. The browser plugin that redirects to one out of many IPFS providers to actually get the file.