[heimindanger]

ipfs.io is the public gateway ran by Protocol Labs staff. There are dozens of other available gateways (we used like 8 gateways total before, and we decided to stick to the most performant ones). We still use infura.io for the videos too.

We have our own gateway that we use for pictures (snap1.d.tube).

These IPFS gateways are a bit like a CDN system. The same file will load through any gateway. example https://ipfs.io/ipfs/Qmb14Qr2Jk55SDu3dtUNccZw7GDpzCHa8VeoZok... is the same as https://snap1.d.tube/ipfs/Qmb14Qr2Jk55SDu3dtUNccZw7GDpzCHa8V... or through any IPFS gateway.

Long term we plan to get rid of these gateways, by using js-ipfs in our player. Works, but not really stable as of my last try (memory leaks that cause the tab to crash after X minutes). With js-ipfs (native javascript IPFS node), we can load files directly from all nodes that have the file pinned, without going through gateways.

Also if you run ipfs locally and use the localhost:8080 gateway, then it's also going full p2p.