Could this mirror the functionality of IPFS in some way, where the content would be in multiple servers/nodes, and would get provided from the one with the best connection based on a content ID? Could even use sats to pay for file storage like FIL pays for storage on the IPFS network.
Just wrote an article about Blossom Drive. a new nostr app I'm building for file sharing and censorship resistant file hosting
If you want to give it a try its hosted at https://blossom.hzrd149.com/
nostr:naddr1qqxkymr0wdek7mfdv3exjan9qgszv6q4uryjzr06xfxxew34wwc5hmjfmfpqn229d72gfegsdn2q3fgrqsqqqa28e4v8zy
Discussion
Yes and no. Blossom uses a SHA256 content hash, so content has a unique ID across the network.
Users can publish which servers they use, so you know where to look for a users content alternatively.
It does not magically solve the storage of the content "somewhere on the internet" though. A user must actively publish his content to multiple servers to get censorship resistance and might need to pay for it.
That being said there are links between servers, so if a piece of content is missing it could be automatically fetched from an upstream server.
Yes IPFS computes a hash, even though it's a bit involved so the hash won't be the same as Blossom's or what sha256sum tells you.
Lack of a DHT is a big one. IPFS's DHT is what they claim makes it scale ("interplanetary" lol) but it's poorly designed and doesn't actually scale well. You'll find lots of timeouts and "content not found" even though the content it out there somewhere.
@simplex also has a similar thing called XFTP