[yamtaddle]

The fundamental problem with any of these p2p-hosting solutions is that most devices folks use these days are battery-powered. Any solution that requires a persistent connection or intermittent network wake-ups to achieve even semi-decent performance won't make it, and if you overcome that hurdle you still won't be able to count on most of the devices downloading content to also serve content. No-one's gonna sacrifice battery life to make the distributed Web dream happen.

They seem a lot more useful for internal infra of hosting providers, though for IPFS in particular I expect the performance isn't consistent enough to be a suitable solution for most of those use cases.

[tinalumfoil]

Having used ipfs casually the big draw for me has been the gateways. Running a full ipfs node on client devices is mostly not practical, but I can choose a trusted (or not so trusted since I can check the hash) gateway and that can handle the heavy lifting for me. And even though the ipfs network is slow, the distributed nature lends itself to very heavy caching, so the gateway doesn't have to be any slower than if it was serving me its own static files.

Plus the gateways provide compatibility to www.

Given, things are far from ideal now. But looking over the water it's good to see Mastodon taking off and I think that's largely because you have the option of just choosing a single trusted provider ("instances") from which you can access the rest of the network. The trusted provider does the heavy lifting for you.

[zozbot234]

IPFS is built to work reasonably well with ephemeral connections. Sure, not everyone is interested in serving content but for those who are it seems to be a reasonable choice.