Putting This Blog on IPFS
"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."<p>This is also, in my opinion, the biggest objection to IPFS - that it really doesn'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/leach ratio like a typical torrent service, but I only torrent a few files at any given time and it's pretty trivial to set them to seed or disable manually; there's no way I'm going to make seed vs. don'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'll just get auto-deleted from my machine when it cycles out of the cache, as the automated stuff is what'll be keeping track of maintaining my seed/leech ratio, total disk usage for other people's content, upload limits, not leaving if you'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's been a long enough time that nobody's still hosting them.<p>And when there'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/leech ratio; but I don'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's enough people who have downloaded the content themselves recently enough that it's still in their cache to meaningfully take the load off the original host in serving that content. But you'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'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).