[MrEldritch]

Yeah, and that's entirely true as an explanation for why IPFS is still valuable - if you have popular content other people have accessed recently or are currently accessing, it can in theory take a ton of load off of your server by letting those people share some of the load to new users. Incredibly powerful for DDoS protection/avoiding the "Hug of Death", and potentially greatly reducing hosting costs by reducing traffic to your particular server at precisely those moments that would be most expensive - when you'd otherwise be serving lots of requests for some newly popular bit of content.

It's just a mistake to view IPFS as allowing for truly "decentralized" websites or as a decentralized file storage platform - unless you have the kind of content that makes other people want to follow the typical torrent model and actively long-term "seed" it by pinning, you'll still need to have your own personal central server to host the content on if and when nobody else is.

Which, yes, IPFS has explicitly never promised that - but a lot of people seem to think it does.

[kkarakk]

this explanation actually makes sense as to a possible use case for this tech. thanks!