It's not just pinning though, is it? This is like saying "why would anyone host your file on BitTorrent", but the reality is that no one has to host your file on BitTorrent. Downloading naturally seeds[1]. Unless something has changed with the pitch, this is the same with IPFS. Not only do people seed while downloading, but it will (eventually) even seed locally first, such as within the same network.
IPFS promises nothing, nor tries to, in the way of permanent archiving. It's about reducing congestion and gaining benefits of immutability. It could archive something in the sense that something popular is difficult to remove.. but that's definitely not a guarantee.
[1]: ignoring aggressive non-sharing downloaders of course
Yeah, and that's entirely true as an explanation for why IPFS is still valuable - if you have popular content other people have accessed recently or are currently accessing, it can in theory take a ton of load off of your server by letting those people share some of the load to new users. Incredibly powerful for DDoS protection/avoiding the "Hug of Death", and potentially greatly reducing hosting costs by reducing traffic to your particular server at precisely those moments that would be most expensive - when you'd otherwise be serving lots of requests for some newly popular bit of content.
It's just a mistake to view IPFS as allowing for truly "decentralized" websites or as a decentralized file storage platform - unless you have the kind of content that makes other people want to follow the typical torrent model and actively long-term "seed" it by pinning, you'll still need to have your own personal central server to host the content on if and when nobody else is.
Which, yes, IPFS has explicitly never promised that - but a lot of people seem to think it does.
You say: IPFS promises nothing, nor tries to, in the way of permanent archiving.
From the IPFS web site[0]:
Humanity's history is deleted daily
...
IPFS keeps every version of your files and makes it simple to set up resilient networks for mirroring of data.
This is clearly stating that the system keeps every version of your files, and it says nothing about "pinning", or the fact that the files will, in fact, not be kept. At best the web site is misleading, at worst it is simply lying.
I don't yet know with the IPFS really is, nor what it really does, but it's statements like that on the IPFS web site that makes me distrustful of the hype.
Imo, the hype is irrelevant. Many people misunderstand IPFS, and the wording that you highlighted doesn't help. Luckily, I view IPFS as a very valuable "technology", and whether or not it specifically wins in this space, I don't care - I care that the technology is useful and I think it (or something like it) will eventually be the future of the web.
So I don't really buy into the hype-drama. So many people are concerned with hype.
Anyway, to your specific points - if you understand IPFS those comments are not entirely off board. However I can understand why they would lead people astray. In reality I see those comments, ie human history being deleted, as a reference to the mutable web. I can find a post on Reddit and today it is meaningful, tomorrow it might be deleted. In a general immutable system, if I reference an immutable address to the content I care about I will always find exactly that content. Whether or not it exists permanently is another issue, one that I don't care about honestly - I care that what exists can't change out from under you. Just by viewing data in an IPFS-like system naturally makes you own it, as you effectively download a copy of it. No one can take that from you.
Now, whether or not you decide to permanently hold onto the data you want is another story. But again, permanency is not likely to be "solved" by anyone.. and honestly, given how so much "content" can be illegal, I don't think we ever can or should solve the permanency issue.
> ignoring aggressive non-sharing downloaders of course
It has not been reasonable to ignore such users for the last five years or so. Like it or not, the computing landscape has shifted to mobile devices which aren’t on all the time and have limited power and bandwidth. Perhaps BitTorrent is OK now, in its niche, but if it were to go mainstream for downloads you’d go from a small fraction of non-sharing downloaders to a high fraction.
Skype’s architecture is an interesting one in that space: it used to be distributed, with many computers all over the place nominated supernodes; but the shift to mobile made that architecture untenable, and so they had to shift to a centralised model, which generally performs worse, to keep it working at all—not for surveillance, but for scalability!
> It has not been reasonable to ignore such users for the last five years or so.
You're taking me the wrong way. I wrote that because I didn't feel like writing paragraphs going into explicit detail over the pros and cons of seed avoiders and how one might handle them, etc. It wasn't the point of the conversation I was trying to make, informing about the general design. BitTorrent works without you hosting the file, so does IPFS, that's the point. Nothing more, nothing less.
Which, I should have known better from HN, but /shrug. I guess in the future I need to be more explicit when I ignore a topic.
IPFS promises nothing, nor tries to, in the way of permanent archiving. It's about reducing congestion and gaining benefits of immutability. It could archive something in the sense that something popular is difficult to remove.. but that's definitely not a guarantee.
[1]: ignoring aggressive non-sharing downloaders of course