Maybe We Shouldn’t Want a Fully Decentralized Web
Why I have stopped with IPFS and the distributed web
I spent a large part of 2019 working with the distributed and decentralized web, especially IPFS, also known as the “Inter-Planetary File System”. I’ve written a few articles on the topic, on how you can host a web app on IPFS, one of which even ended up on the front page of HackerNews.
For about a year, I hosted my blog and other apps through an IPFS cluster. I wrote a utility for making pinning files easier on Pinata, a third-party cloud service for IPFS. I made some small contributions to the IPFS core projects. I built some projects with it, including one that I never released-nor fully completed-that used both IPFS and Ethereum. And I even gave a talk about hosting static web apps on IPFS at Node+JS Interactive last December in Montreal.
That all changed in the Spring of 2020. I called myself out of the distributed web.
My blog and other apps I built aren’t hosted on IPFS anymore. I don’t participate in those online communities anymore. I’ve stopped writing about the distributed and researching about it. I’ve shelved all my projects that were using those technologies.
I also updated my blog posts about IPFS adding a note that my blog isn’t hosted that way anymore…
