[AgentME]

No, if you run ipfs, you only host what you choose to host and things that you have recently requested. Your node doesn't passively accept content from others to host. (Otherwise, a joker would probably saturate the entire network's hosting capacity with /dev/urandom, or everyone would saturate the network's hosting capacity with their own encrypted backups, etc.)

I think there must be something wrong with the way ipfs presents itself, because I see this misconception (that just running ipfs causes you to host anything) often.

[kodablah]

It's likely due to people thinking that "distributed" means "distributed by default". IPFS needs to gear it's docs to make people think in terms of Bittorrent (i.e. pinning, seeding, etc) and not in terms of RAID (i.e. sharding, high availability).

[jstanley]

I wonder how much of it is the NSA and GCHQ's of the world trying to scare people away from using IPFS...

[kakarot]

Willing to bet that guy didn't read the docs, maybe this is a public relations issue.

[book_mentioned]

>> All content received is automagically re-distributed by default

> you only host [...] things that you have recently requested

Thank you for taking the time to correct my misunderstanding, but is this not restating what I wrote?

Or are you rejecting the other portion of the comment discussing caching popular content (never requested/received)?

[AgentME]

Oh, I just realized I missed the word "received" in your first sentence! I don't have much to add to how you actually worded the sentence.

I think the automatic re-sharing of recently requested content is only for a short time period (elsewhere someone mentions 30 minutes). Probably not anything anyone should rely much on; it just sounds like a bonus to maybe soften the blow a little bit if you get a lot of activity suddenly.