On the topic of IPFS, but also slightly tangential -- how has nobody written an Activity Pub client/server in Javascript and distributed it as a Browser Addon?
If an IPFS node/server can be literally hosted via a Firefox Extension[1], how has nobody done the same for an arguably easier protocol like Activity Pub?
Ipfs is a pull protocol. Activitypub is normally implemented as a push one (despite the specification having outboxes, so in theory it should be able to do either)
The ideas behind IPFS definitely seem to reflect the unchangeable URL intentions of this article. However, IPFS is also more limited, as edits and updates require special handling and interactivity is simply not possible.
Furthermore, IPFS is too slow to be usable in practice. I'd love it to become a serious alternative to the web in terms of documents and blog posts, but the amount of timeouts and 30+ second loading times you need to tolerate to get any IPFS page to load makes it very difficult to tolerate.
At least with the NFT scams IPFS found a real-life purpose, something I hadn't expected to see. That's dying down now, I think, so who knows how long the most active pin servers will stick around.
There are multiple libraries and software giving you a gateway, but there's no public gateway. It would fall into problematic use in less than an hour because of the insanity that IP is, and it would completely contradict the whole idea of being decentralized
If an IPFS node/server can be literally hosted via a Firefox Extension[1], how has nobody done the same for an arguably easier protocol like Activity Pub?
1: https://github.com/ipfs/js-ipfs