Putting This Blog on IPFS
&quot;Even if my server goes down, as long as these files are pinned somewhere, anyone should be able to use that IPNS name at another gateway and see the blog.&quot;<p>This is also, in my opinion, the biggest objection to IPFS - that it really doesn&#x27;t necessarily lead to <i>any</i> kind of true decentralized hosting unless someone else has decided to pin your files.<p>And why would they? I understand that IPFS is supposed to prioritize connections based on seed&#x2F;leach ratio like a typical torrent service, but I only torrent a few files at any given time and it&#x27;s pretty trivial to set them to seed or disable manually; there&#x27;s no way I&#x27;m going to make seed vs. don&#x27;t seed decisions on <i>every website I visit.</i> So unless for some reason I specifically think to help share some webpage or other, it&#x27;ll just get auto-deleted from my machine when it cycles out of the cache, as the automated stuff is what&#x27;ll be keeping track of maintaining my seed&#x2F;leech ratio, total disk usage for other people&#x27;s content, upload limits, not leaving if you&#x27;re one of the only seeders left, etc. In theory, IPFS could be even <i>more</i> prone to link-rot than the vanilla Web, depending on how many people try and actually depend on the decentralized hosting and end up having their files vanish once it&#x27;s been a long enough time that nobody&#x27;s still hosting them.<p>And when there&#x27;s so many different webpages, as opposed to just a few torrents, why would I think to pin any one thing in particular? Torrents can work based on charity and the need to maintain a particular seed&#x2F;leech ratio; but I don&#x27;t have the mental energy to bother deciding whether to be charitable about every dang website I visit.<p>So this ends up meaning that IPFS works for <i>popular, recent</i> content, where there&#x27;s enough people who have downloaded the content themselves recently enough that it&#x27;s still in their cache to meaningfully take the load off the original host in serving that content. But you&#x27;re not going to get dedicated long-term seeders of any particular site the way you do with highly-desirable files like pirate torrents. But generically, you will always need your own centralized server for any content you want to upload and make sure stays online long-term.<p>As I understand it, this is sort of the problem Filecoin is trying to solve, but that has its own issues (it&#x27;s hard to see how paying people to host your stuff on their own machines can ever be cost-competitive with paying AWS to do it).