Matt City Forever: What Everyone Can Do to Matt City

Everyone who has been shopping in Matt City should have noticed that at the top of each article in Matt City, there will be a "distributed entry" button. Click this button and you can find the "fingerprint" of this article. is the CID. This "work fingerprint" is a mark of the article uploaded to the IPFS network, which is the so-called CID. As introduced in this pop-up page, "work fingerprint" is the unique identifier of this article, which means that you can find this work in the IPFS network through "work fingerprint", not necessarily through Matt City website. And as long as you access Matt City's articles directly through the IPFS network, you are actually contributing to a permanent and unrestricted access (mainland users also) Matt City.

This sounds very mysterious. I just visited Matt City through the IPFS network. How come I am contributing to Matt City? To explain this, we need to learn a little bit about how the IPFS network works. In the world of the IPFS network, everything you upload will have its CID, and other users can get a file through the CID. When the file was just uploaded, there was only one contributor to the file, the person who published the file. But everyone who accesses the file will cache the file and become one of the contributors to the file. This means that when there are more visitors to a file, the more contributors to the file, and the faster other users get the file (visitors can start from the contributor who is the fastest from him). download the file there). When the number of contributors of a file reaches a certain level, if the original publisher disappears, the file will not be published anymore. This file will not disappear, and others can still access this file. The example of Matt City is that when everyone uses the IPFS network to access Matt City, if Matt City cannot be accessed one day. Users accessing Matt City articles via IPFS will not be greatly affected, they can still continue to access Matt City articles from other people who have already visited, and they will not notice any difference.

And this mechanism not only allows Matt City's articles to perpetuate, another advantage is that this mechanism allows your articles to break through the censorship block. For example, when we used the IPFS network to access the articles in Matt City, we became the contributors to the articles in Matt City. Although the servers in Matt City have been blocked by mainland China, those of us who have visited (especially It is a Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan user, you have a fast connection to the mainland, and there is no censorship restriction) is also a contributor to this article, and we are not blocked. Therefore, mainland users can still obtain this article from our computer, thus breaking through the limitations of the censorship system.

So how do we use the IPFS network to access Matt City articles?

First we need to download an IPFS-Dekstop

Here, choose the installation package you use for the system. If it is a Windows user, choose .exe. If it is a macOS user, choose dmg or mac.zip. If it is a Linux user, Linux users should be able to solve this problem by themselves (laughs).

After the installation is started, open your node list and find more than one node, which means you have successfully started the IPFS node and joined the IPFS network

The next step is how to access the article in Matt City through this node. There are actually many methods, but I recommend using a browser plug-in to achieve direct jump access. Here we need to use a plugin called ipfs-companion .

You can find download links for different browser plugins here.

After the download and installation are complete, our configuration work should be over. You can start using it.

We use the IPFS network to access this article using ZandY 's translation of "Coexisting with Censorship" as an example.

Open the "Distributed Portal" page and select Copy "Work Fingerprint".

Then type in your browser address bar:

 ipfs://QmNpzA6t9zNiMiBAv2T9mcQgYw7Ntk5FHWjkx8eM1GwTTh

The rule here is to start with "ipfs://" and then add "work fingerprint". Hit enter and you should be able to see the IPFS web version of this article.

And this is when you contribute to the perpetuation and unrestricted access of the city of Matt.
thank you very much for your help.

In addition, if you want to know more about IPFS, please read the " IPFS Introduction and Usage Guide " I published earlier.