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Comment by bmcusick | Hacker News Reader

Not necessarily. IPFS is sort of like Bittorrent on steroids. You can think of yourself as the first seeder of your website, but as long as there are other network participants that have a full copy of your site, your home PC doesn't need to be online for people to access it.

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Right, but when you want to publish something on the internet, wondering (and hoping) whether there is at least one copy out there in the ether is the last thing you want to have to worry about: your site has to be accessible all the time.

In practice, it does mean you need an origin available all the time, and it's either you providing it, or some other service you pay to do it. I don't think there's any magic.

Agreed. It does do some magic for you, when your site gets posted on HackerNews, but in practice you still want to maintain at least one permanent host for anything semi-important.

Exactly. They do need to get a copy of your site first, though, and they do that by accessing it (so someone else needs to have visited your site first).

Otherwise, you can use https://www.eternum.io/ (which is a service we also made) to basically seed your site for a few cents a month.

I'm a layman in this stuff, can IPFS sites be accesible from http?

IPFS is its own standard, so your homepage might look like ipfs://blog.iagovar.co

But since most browsers don't support IPFS natively yet there are IPFS gateways that allow you to access IPFS sites through them.

through gateways, yes. There a bunch of public ones, or you can run your own.

Yes, through any of the publically available IPFS gateways. ipfs.io is one of the more common official ones, but since they're all connected to the same network, in theory the content should be available from any of them. You can also host your own gateway (locally or publically) and point your browser at it.

If you're wanting to make something with DNS in front of it to mask the long IPFS content hashes, you can do that too, there's a good overview of the process in their examples:

https://ipfs.io/docs/examples/example-viewer/example#../webs...

As much as email, usenet irc and jabber/xmpp can be accessed over Http(s) - there are gateways.

(xmpp might be a special case here - I'm uncertain of the underlying transport for jabber; could be that js+http(s) is enough to simulate actual jabber client?)

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