*The IPFS Project is not sunsetting or shutting down* - just switching to individual maintainer grants instead of centralized implementation support within Shipyard.
It's still a a real loss, those are widely used products, but the signal that Protocol Labs is sending about IPFS in defunding this might be even worse for the ecosystem. Cloudflare, Brave, and now Protocol Labs have abandoned it.
Maintainers of IPFS are winding down is much more informative for those not in the space.
The end of IPFS at Shipyard: (Many) IPFS Maintainers Winding Down
In November 2023 Protocol Labs published a plan for exactly this situation: independent foundations, IP transferred out of Protocol Labs, the IPFS and libp2p teams becoming independent entities, and public goods funds that Protocol Labs made "a major pledge" to. https://pl.xyz/blog/advancing-ipfs-and-libp2p-governance/
Three years on, the entity those maintainers formed is winding down because that funding was not renewed, and the most detailed public account of what replaces it is a comment in this thread. pl.xyz still says Protocol Labs "continues to support those projects".
Shipyard's last day is September 30. Can you name who holds Kubo, Boxo and Helia on October 1? Not the funding mechanism, the people: who has commit and release rights, who receives an embargoed vulnerability report, and who decides when a fix ships. A grant that has not been awarded yet is a plan to make a plan.
Same for "one of many IPFS implementation maintainers". Which other team ships Kubo, Boxo or Helia? Iroh is a separate project, not a second maintainer of these.
These questions are already on the forum and unanswered: https://discuss.ipfs.tech/t/what-happens-to-ipfs-maintenance...
Protocol Labs is moving and offering to pay (as far as I understand) the same maintainers and developers directly; just not via Shipyard.