IPFS is the Distributed Web
ipfs is fantastic, but it is half the solution. We also need a distributed p2p application framework, with which nodes can securely communicate and allow building distributed apps, like search.<p>We can think differently with ipfs. Traditional web allows everyone to publish content <i>somewhere</i>, hoping that search engines will index it.<p>With ipfs, the same file (with the same content) is only indexed/stored once and then you reference the hash to get to the content.<p>This fact changes the problem of search.<p>Take all the world's movies. With ipfs + p2p network, you only need <i>one</i> back end in the form of a distributed search index, which can index all the movies in the world.<p>Same with the world's music. You only need <i>one</i> back end which can index all the music.<p>The index can be as simple as {"movie title": [sha256]}, where the array contains the hashes of different 'encodings' of the same content (eg. 'dvd rip', 'blue ray' or 'mp3').<p>Content can be indexed by all kinds of properties of course and it can grow organically over time to include more and more details.<p>With ipfs plus the p2p network we'll build 'apps', not 'pages'. People can have a list of 'apps' running on their machines - which are node instances in various distributed applications, sharing the same p2p network and using ipfs as storage.<p>Apps can have 'backend' and 'front end' parts - the back end is the part which participates in the p2p network, while the 'front end' provides a human interface to the back end, were users can search/browse/view the content.<p>Apps are distributed as git repositories stored in ipfs, while the 'core' running on the user's machine compiles the sources (inside a build vm) and loads the resulting binaries into containers running in virtual machines.<p>This would make it easy for devs to write and publish new distributed apps, making the network totally decentralised and virtually unstoppable.<p>Ps. If you feel that this insanity could work, then I'd love to discuss it in more depth - delegate78@gmx.com