[MrEldritch]

And in any case, even though a centralized server is still needed for p. much any practical use case, it's not like that makes IPFS useless - it's still possible in principle for any given bit of content to stick around basically forever and its link to keep working, even if the server goes down, as long as other people want to save it.

Plus, even if almost nothing is going to really be truly dcentralized, it could make hosting a site a heck of a lot easier because the traffic you personally have to deal with may be drastically reduced, as popular content gets uploaded to the first users who can then share with later users. You only have to be the exclusive host of content that's accessed more rarely than the period it'd typically stick around in the cache of the last person to ask for it. (depending on whether or not that last person is currently online.)

(It's easy to imagine a case where short-term decentralized hosting from user caches could be almost entirely sufficient - say, an IPFS-based version of 4chan, where threads are inherently short-lived and temporary objects anyway, and only in the very slowest and least-populated boards would you have threads that are checked so infrequently that you couldn't rely on the currently online user caches to contain that content. You'd still need a central server to do things like spam filtering, user authentication (to make bans stick), and update the index of what files hashes and post hashes are in which threads and in which order, and which threads are currently alive on each board)