[sliken]

Sure, IPFS isn't a great archive of uninteresting content that needs to be kept forever.

But imagine the normal thing is to give 1GB of cache to IPFS. Granted if a planet worth of 1GB cache's isn't enough to save your content then it's not interesting enough.

[MrEldritch]

The thing I'm worried about is niche content that is very interesting/useful, but only rarely - the kind of stuff that old Web1.0 personal sites, blogs, forum threads, and university-faculty webpages can be a treasure trove of, and which is especially prone to linkrot. It is precisely this content that a "permanent Web" would be of most interest, to me, about preserving. This is the "long tail" of content - any individual piece is only rarely interesting and only to some people, but in aggregate they actually make up a substantial fraction of the value of the Web to me.

So if IPFS aspires to be the "permanent Web", but is virtually useless for preserving these, it hardly seems to qualify. With a few exceptions (for very large content that would require a ton of bandwidth to download and host, or to very complex content that requires preserving the structure of a whole large website to stay functional instead of individual pages, or for inherently server-side content), the kind of stuff that would be popular enough for someone to pin virtually never vanishes from the Web - even if links to it do break - because that's the kind of stuff that has almost certainly already been saved locally & reposted to other websites. And the stuff that's served unpinned from user caches is, very clearly, not permanent.

So it's a "permanent Web" ... which is, at best, barely less fragile and prone to linkrot than the current web, in that if content is popular at one point and then the site layout changes or the original host goes down entirely it can still be kept up at the same link if someone was smart enough to save it locally, and specific versions of a website can be linked to specifically (even if nobody's necessarily hosting them anymore). But in all other respects, it is exactly as ephemeral as the current Web, and the fancy decentralized parts of it that are different than the current Web are among the most ephemeral parts, while the option to still have the boring old fragile centralized-server solutions where you host your own content personally are the durable ones.

[roywiggins]

I guess the Internet Archive could just throw everything it has into IPFS and pin it. It's not much better than the current situation (in which the Archive is the backup for all those old academic sites and forum threads that have rotted away) but on IPFS instead.

[ric2b]

If literally no one in the world cares enough about a website to dedicate some of their resources to it, does it really matter that much?