I can purchase a droplet on digital ocean than has gigabit and a terabyte of transfer every month for $5. A terabyte is more than enough content for me. I am sure most people could afford that to manage their interneting.
>I am sure most people could afford that to manage their interneting
And before the spec has even seen real adoption, we've already seen it centralize into a few major providers.
A bit tongue-in-cheek, but it's a real issue. HTTP isn't the reason things are centralizing so much as economies of scale and convenience are. I see nothing about IPFS that fundamentally changes that, and think we'd likely see similar centralization over time.
Git, one of the inspirational technologies, is in theory distributed as well and in practice hyper-centralized to only a few major providers.
I'd much rather host content from my home (and, living in a very sunny Australian city, power that with PV and battery storage at a low amortised cost) - but I can't, because the network to support that isn't there.
I get about 7Mb/s down and and 1Mb/s up - my link is highly asymmetric. When I finally get off ADSL and on to the new National Broadband Network, that'll still be asymmetric.
I can see why networks are built that way, given the current centralisation of infrastructure, but the build also reinforces centralisation.
Think back to 20 years ago when most business network connections, even for small business, were symmetric. Hosting stuff on-site (email servers, web servers, ...) was far more common.
Git repositories are replicated all over.
My laptop has mirrors of all my work's projects and many open source projects.
Imagine how many secure mirrors of, say, the React repository is out there. GitHub is basically just a conveniently located copy.
That's real and tangible decentralization. It's a magical property of the DVCS architecture that it's decentralized even when it's centralized, so to speak.
I agree that there are issues with central hubs though. Maybe the most significant one is that organizational structures and rules are defined in a centralized way on GitHub.
If you look at blockchains as another kind of DVCS that's totally focused on authority, legitimacy, and security, then it seems pretty likely that we'll end up using those to control commits and releases.
The kinds of tools that would make distributing those aspects of github are precisely what this article is advocating for!