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The permanence of a "site" in IPFS is intrinsically bound to the active participation of those social entities propelling the sites content.

So, were we to have IPFS support directly in the browser, every time you or I take a look at the pics in a thread, for example, we'd be contributing to the effort to keep things on the IPFS network, to our nearest local trusted peers, for as long as the subject is relevant.

So, your typical net forum, whose members are dedicated to the subject, would communicate about that subject a such, and in so doing .. perpetuate the network.

Yes, the IPFS web has to be tended. But so do your servers. Your servers will die in an instant if 10 or so people die, in an instant (extreme case), or for any one of a thousand different - social - reasons. In this case though the technology is aligned; the load of supporting an IPFS web is being distributed among people whose interest supports the subject, instead of the centralized, sysadmin-with-keys-of-godlike-power. This de-centralization should be considered an attack on devops. IPFS means that the admin of establishing a distributed content delivery system capable of scaling to load, no longer requires an admin. The user is the admin.

> Basically, why would I choose IPFS, which is in this case equivalent to self hosting, over flickr, instagram, etc?

Personally, I'd like to have some data backed up in several places and have links that don't break. IPFS allows for that.

Flickr sells up and goes down? All the links to images break.

> However, it's not really IPFS that is making the permanence possible so much as the Internet Archive in that circumstance.

Both, surely. The major thing that IPFS also allows is backups of the IA without any single person needing to be able to host absolutely everything.

You are right though, there is a big difference between allowing permanent backups and guaranteeing them.

IPFS also allows IA to not just be a backup, but to help distribute the original content itself. There's no longer a distinction between origin hosts and backups.

Yes, that's a very good point.

>Old websites will simply vanish, even ones that are otherwise maintained on the current web.

Not really. Today, a website needs to be maintained by the original host or it goes away. If IPFS were used, the same site would need to be hosted by the original host or any other interested party.

If absolutely nobody else is interested enough to host it, the original host can continue to do so, and the site would be in the same situation as today's sites: hosted by one node.

>In particular, applications like this post itself, that are part backup part publishing, aren't great applications of IPFS because your images are just hosted off your home internet connection. Power outage? No data. ISP issue? No data. Hardware failure? Hope you had a real backup. Basically, why would I choose IPFS, which is in this case equivalent to self hosting, over flickr, instagram, etc?

While I haven't looked at the source code, I'm fairly certain ipfs.pics is uploading the photos to their servers as well. It's effectively a Flickr-type site using IPFS as the backend, with the added benefit that the photos may still be available somewhere else if their servers disappear.