Announcing collaborative clusters

We are very excited to announce the first set of public collaborative clusters and the first iteration of the collaborative clusters website.

Collaborative clusters are an easy way to join and help improving distribution and data availability of specific datasets in the IPFS Network.

Using IPFS Cluster’s latest release (0.12.1) we have set up the first of those archives:

Filecoin cluster: which will be used to pin Filecoin parameters and Filecoin objects.

Spanish books from the Gutenberg Project: a collection of Spanish literature from the Gutenberg Project.

IPFS Websites: a list with a few of the IPFS-universe websites (such as ipfs.io, libp2p.io).

Users can join these clusters by running a single ipfs-cluster-follow command. You will need to have enough space available in your IPFS repository (check the size row for each cluster on the website).

Instructions on how to setup and join these and, in the future, other collaborative clusters can be found at https://collab.ipfscluster.io. You can stop and re-start replication whenever you want. Also, here’s a quick video to show how easy it is:

We hope that collaborative clusters will allow the community to participate in the distribution and seeding of data they care about, enabling easy “mirroring” on the IPFS network, along with unlocking Content-Distribution-Network (CDN) properties.

Creating your own Clusters

Collaborative clusters are no different from normal IPFS Clusters, with the exception that they include a list of trusted peers (peers that can modify the cluster pinset).

The process of setting up one of these and letting other peers easily join as followers is documented at https://cluster.ipfs.io/documentation/collaborative/.

About the IPFS Cluster project

The IPFS Cluster project provides data orchestration across a swarm of IPFS daemons by allocating, replicating and tracking a global pinset distributed among multiple peers.

For full documentation on how to setup and operate clusters, see https://cluster.ipfs.io/documentation.