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Are you able to “pin” files yourself like IPFS? Or are you required to pay hosts to store it?

You can always run a host yourself and pin it to your own host.

The main reason we chose a host-based architecture instead of a pin based architecture is that we saw on IPFS that having people pin their own data resulted in really poor uptimes, a lot of file rot, and it also substantially reduced scalability and increased fetch times. And after all of those tradeoffs, the vast majority of accessible content on IPFS is hosted via a pinning service anyway.

Makes sense. I’ve just been looking at creating a distributed YT archive on IPFS, but as you said, load times are absolutely terrible, especially for big files like video. I’ve been following sia since 2016-ish, and skynet looks awesome, just worried about maturity. I will try hosting my own files as you described, thanks!

> You can always run a host yourself and pin it to your own host.

(It sounds like it, but) to clarify, can you do this completely for free, with no cooperation from a third party (eg, you don't need to pay a existing host to vouch for you)?

No need to pay an existing host or get any sort of external party to enable you, it's a permissionless network

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