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Comment by agentofuser | Hacker News Reader

If you pin to IPFS and then use a public http gateway like https://cloudflare-ipfs.com, which caches and distributes via their CDN, you'll have a good CDN alternative.

If you just use IPFS directly with a non-CDN'd, non-cached http gateway, the latency will probably be prohibitive for regular web stuff.

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So what stops me from abusing Cloudflare's gateway as a free CDN for petabytes of traffic? There has to be a catch?

Edit: found it. https://www.reddit.com/r/ipfs/comments/al8emd/cloudflare_ban...

But isn't it like a torrent? where if more people are viewing the item, it can be served faster from more places, like torrent seeders?

Yes, definitely. I mean, you certainly get better bandwidth and latency depending on popularity and geographic diversity of seeders, and there are even youtube-alternative websites that host videos on IPFS. But for something like browsing from one page to the next, where the payload is small and you want <200ms latency, I think just the DHT lookup might already put you above that budget. I'm guessing though, haven't made any measurements.

Who gets <200ms latency anymore when Google analytics and FB pixel tracking scripts take more than that each and most websites have them?

Those scripts are loaded asynchronously; you can start seeing content before they are ready.

In torrent when you download something you also announce yourself as a seeder. In ipfs afaik you have to explicitly pin something in order for your peer to be announced as a provider.

This means that even if your content in ipfs is popular it won’t be fast.

No, everyone with the item is a seeder in ipfs. Pinning means the node won't delete it.

I should add, since you didn't specifically mention web stuff, that it _can_ be used as a CDN for stuff that is less latency-sensitive, like software package managers. That is in fact, the main focus of 2019 for Protocol Labs, the company behind IPFS.

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