ipfs has never worked for me. It’s such garbage. everytime someone suggests to use it for file storage in nostr I scream internally.
Some interesting comments about IPFS: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37750529
Basically all people who have used it realized it wasn't working, but those who were heavily invested on it used their cognitive dissonance to reframe it as "good for internal networks" or to say that "now it is going to get better".
Discussion
Are there any serious methods of decentralised storage? I’ve read about storing files in a blob/string inside a #nostr note itself, which puts the onus of work (storing and distributing) squarely on the relay. Another method that I think isn’t getting enough attention is the usage of Torrents.
I personally like bittorrent (especially v2), once we have a way to combine lightning with that to incentivize storage of certain files or chunks, that would be ideal.
I was working on this protocol but realized it might be tricky
Really... What headway did you make on that endeavor? What was tricky about it? This is a topic that interests me greatly.
There is a similar project already, made by some Dutch students I believe, that has a “honoring” system (no crypto coin) to determine if you seeded enough to be allowed to download faster. This system was called Tribler.
https://repository.tudelft.nl/record/uuid:9a7bc08f-9f7f-43fc-a410-3961d13c6e8a
I think it very much depends on what’s being stored and who ought to have access to it. Are we talking about meme files that anyone should be able to download? Or personal documents in encrypted bundles?