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> Instead it has a multi-million dollar company behind it, and VC's who demand profits from a thing that shouldn't have ever had a business plan.

But you don't have to host curl? Who's gonna put the money to host all the images and bandwidths that ten of thousands of companies use but never pay?

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It could have been designed with a self-host option or a torrent/ipfs backend for near-zero hosting costs and still be 'just works' for the user.

Even dumber, it should have just been pointers to encrypted files hosted on any arbitrary web server.

pretty sure you haven't used ipfs before.

for users to download resources from ifps you either need to install the client (which quite resource intensive) or use the gateways (which is just a server and cost money to run).

also the speed and reliability are nowhere good enough for serious works.

THIS!

Alternatives:

- Virtual registry that builds and caches image chains on-demand, locally

- Maybe a free protocol like Bit Torrent to store and transfer the images

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