How can I share links to my IPFS content if HTTP gateway URLs are blocked by some social media sites and firewall vendors?

Question

IPFS is a distributed filesystem to which anyone can add and retrieve content, which is indexed by CID (content-hash), so each file gets a deterministic, immutable identifier.

IPFS gateways make content from the network available to web clients. Because they serve HTML content, they have been abused in the past for phishing attacks. In response, several security vendors added some of the gateway hosts to their URL filters. 😕

Because the offending content lives at subdomains and not the root content, it would be proper to treat these URLs like GitHub pages or similar, and apply the block to the subdomain, not the full domain. We are pursuing inclusion of some of our gateways onto the public suffix list, which would help security vendors know to give IFPS gateway URLs the correct treatment.

In the meantime, when posting gateway URLs to social media, or accessing them via some security firewalls, the URL can be blocked.

Is there a better way to share this content?

Answer 1

My workaround to use for now is to try IPFS gateways that are on the public suffix list. For now that means

*.dweb.link

But there is a long list of public gateways here, so check them if you need to use another one. Sometimes it can take a while for you content to be available on a new gateway, but often the second request is faster. You can also run a gateway under a new name that hasn't been hit by the content filters yet.

If you original URL looks like

https://bafybeiemxf5abjwjbikoz4mc3a3dla6ual3jsgpdr4cjr3oz3evfyavhwq.ipfs.w3s.link/wiki/Vincent_van_Gogh.html

You'll want to change the last part of the hostname from w3s to dweb, so it looks like:

https://bafybeiemxf5abjwjbikoz4mc3a3dla6ual3jsgpdr4cjr3oz3evfyavhwq.ipfs.dweb.link/wiki/Vincent_van_Gogh.html