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You do NOT need to explicitly pin content to help replicate it. Any content which is requested via IPFS is replicated by the daemon, up until it is GCed. The only thing that pinning does, is prevent the content from ever being GCed

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You make it sound like if merely accessing a resource will make my ipfs node share it to others. Is that the case?

Yes.

Yes, analogous to downloading a torrent. The GC is run pretty regularly by default so you generally want to pin anything you want to keep local.

As far as I remember GC isn't run by default - but it could have changed

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