[holmesworcester]

(Quiet founder here)

IPFS can actually run quite well over Tor, and you don't have to use IPFS on a big global network for it to be useful.

We've modified the libp2p WebSocket transport to connect exclusively over Tor to Tor onion services, and we give every Quiet community (like a Discord "server" or Slack workspace) their own IPFS network. Since Tor v3 onion addresses are unguessable, this creates a nice outer security boundary around each community.

As others in the thread have pointed out, the disadvantage of not using a global IPFS network with "pinning services" etc. is that if no one else in your specific community is online, asynchronous message delivery will be disrupted. That said, I believe the privacy benefits are well-worth it.

IPFS is also much more performant when running on networks of a few hundred or thousand users, as opposed to the big global network, so that's another nice thing about the approach we've taken, in addition to the privacy benefits.