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Hi All, I've been following and using Nexus for a number of years now and while I've never posted a mod to Nexus I am an appreciative consumer of the talented and dedicated people who make the games I play more enjoyable. I currently work on IPFS (https://ipfs.io/) which is an open source peer to peer protocol that helps people securely find and distribute data without needing to care exactly where the data is hosted. In short people can add a file to a locally running IPFS node and they will get out a long digital fingerprint (i.e. a hash like SHA256) that uniquely identifies the content. When someone in the future wants to find that content they ask the network "hey does anyone know where I can find the file with this digital fingerprint?" and if so they can download the data from them. I've been thinking that it might be helpful if mods could be tagged with their IPFS digital fingerprints then it would be possible for mod managers like Vortex to support downloading mods over IPFS as well as from public server infrastructure like Nexus. There are a number of reasons this could be pretty convenient but a few that are currently on my mind are: If your friend comes over and you try and download a mod they already have you won't waste time or bandwidth going to Nexus for the mod since you'll automatically find that the data is accessible over your home network Nexus' bandwidth costs could come down which could help out the team maintaining this fantastic services. If Nexus' costs were to ever exceed their inbound revenue then this great service would go away. I suspect there are a number of users who might be willing to donate their bandwidth to keep the mods they use alive but would find it more difficult to actually give money to a paid service. Mod packs. This technique could make it easier for people who want to document the exact set of mods they're using (e.g. streamers) to put together this list and make it easier for people to download the entire set of mods even if they come from various different websites Making mods easier to get even if a particular distribution point is unavailable (e.g. website down, DDoS, website blocked in your country, etc.).I understand that the modding community has varied opinions on how mods should be found and distributed. For those of you who have been active in the community longer or who are involved with maintaining Nexus or Vortex what do you think about this idea? If I were to work on a Vortex extension that would simply try to fetch the data via IPFS if there was some nexus metadata tag containing the digital fingerprint of the data would that be welcome? Are there any folks here who might be interested in helping me out a bit on the Nexus/Vortex side of things, as that might make my life a little easier :smile: ? Thanks and looking forward to your feedback
