The post here is pretty confusing (so no blame to anyone who reads this as "IPFS the project" shutting down instead of just a single maintainer team, it's totally misleading) - but this is actually just a sunset announcement for _Shipyard_ - one of many IPFS implementation maintainers.
*The IPFS Project is not sunsetting or shutting down* - just switching to individual maintainer grants instead of centralized implementation support within Shipyard.
@dang yes, and title is editorialized, the real one is "The end of IPFS at Shipyard" which is more informative
It's still a a real loss, those are widely used products, but the signal that Protocol Labs is sending about IPFS in defunding this might be even worse for the ecosystem. Cloudflare, Brave, and now Protocol Labs have abandoned it.
“@dang“ doesn't do anything, email the address at the bottom of the page if you're wanting to propose an administrative or editorial action.
This is worth a flag. IPFS no longer having mantainers is VERY far from one company not supporting IPFS anymore.
Except no-one knows what shipyard is and it could more easily be mistaken for the end of IPFS.
Maintainers of IPFS are winding down is much more informative for those not in the space.
In the future, if you want to editorialize a title, do so after the official title:
The end of IPFS at Shipyard: (Many) IPFS Maintainers Winding Down
I think it’s easy to infer from that title that “shipyard” is an individual project or organization and not IPFS as a whole
one of many, or the main maintainers? seems like they run a lot of the well known public infra too.
Shipyard has been one of the main maintainers because they have previously been an aggregator of funding — think consulting firm, that gets grants and hires people.
Protocol Labs is moving and offering to pay (as far as I understand) the same maintainers and developers directly; just not via Shipyard.
"Just switching to individual maintainer grants" implies a switch that has been planned. Protocol Labs made this call, so the timeline was not a surprise to them.
In November 2023 Protocol Labs published a plan for exactly this situation: independent foundations, IP transferred out of Protocol Labs, the IPFS and libp2p teams becoming independent entities, and public goods funds that Protocol Labs made "a major pledge" to. https://pl.xyz/blog/advancing-ipfs-and-libp2p-governance/
Three years on, the entity those maintainers formed is winding down because that funding was not renewed, and the most detailed public account of what replaces it is a comment in this thread. pl.xyz still says Protocol Labs "continues to support those projects".
Shipyard's last day is September 30. Can you name who holds Kubo, Boxo and Helia on October 1? Not the funding mechanism, the people: who has commit and release rights, who receives an embargoed vulnerability report, and who decides when a fix ships. A grant that has not been awarded yet is a plan to make a plan.
Same for "one of many IPFS implementation maintainers". Which other team ships Kubo, Boxo or Helia? Iroh is a separate project, not a second maintainer of these.
These questions are already on the forum and unanswered: https://discuss.ipfs.tech/t/what-happens-to-ipfs-maintenance...