CID to IPNS _redirects

[Winterhuman]

I was just reading ipfs/kubo#8890 & ipfs/ipfs-docs#1275 when I realised the spec only defines redirecting paths to other paths (e.g. cid.ipfs.dweb.link/blog/* -> cid.ipfs.dweb.link/new-blog/:splat), however, I think it would be very useful to be able to redirect users from CIDs to IPNS addresses. e.g.

cid.ipfs.dweb.link -> key.ipns.dweb.link

I'm opening this issue to discuss some of the problems with this before continuing with an IPIP proposal. For instance, would this make deliberately navigating to individual CIDs more difficult (such as for archiving)? Perhaps the gateway should prompt the user with a message asking if they want to redirect (like .onion redirects in a way)? And if this opens any privacy or security issues.

[lidel]

Is this just a "nice to have" exploration, or do you have a real world use case in mind for this?

IPIP 0002 had specific problems in mind (link rot, SPA, 404s), and we solved multiple of them there while being cognizant to have the same behavior everywhere (subdomains, native handlers in Brave, DNSLink website hosting). That is why path redirects from IPIP 0002 are applied only within a single DAG.

If I understand your proposal correctly, you want to not only redirect from one content root to another, but mix immutable namespace with mutable one. The former would not work for DNSLink websites, because they have only a single root, so your proposal would introduce special-casing for that and different behavior in different contexts. The latter is just a hard no: an immutable content path should always return the same result, so we would have to add even more special casing and exclude HTTP 200 responses.

It does not sound feasible, but lmk if I misunderstood your intent.

[Winterhuman]

I agree with your assessment, good points on how it would affect DNSLink and other systems that I hadn't considered. My use case is that if you, let's say, run a blog, and someone accesses one of your blog posts by it's CID, it's not possible to go past the blog post's own root to the blog's homepage (using the blog's root's CID would be impossible in general since that's a loop, but for IPNS it's technically possible).

I think what I'm looking for is some sort of "root button", a link on a blog post which takes you to the homepage regardless of if the blog post is accessed on it's own CID or not, but, without using a key.ipns.gateway.tld link which centralises on one gateway. Last time I checked, ipfs:// & ipns:// links aren't handled by IPFS gateways, perhaps that's what I'm looking for?

Let me know if you have any better solutions, you'd probably have a better idea than I do of how to safely and easily handle this situation

[github-actions]

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[Winterhuman]

I'm going to close this issue, using _redirects to solve this isn't viable, I'll open a separate issue if I think of anything