@thejohalfiles @mcsamm All the photos uploaded to Steepshot are stored in both decentralized IPFS storage and centralized cloud storage. IPFS-hash of the image is stored to Steem blockchain in post's json_metadata together with a link to a centralized storage stored in post's body.

We see the following blockers for full IPFS integration in Steepshot:

• IPFS protocol never guarantees you that the image/file is going to be received by the end user that requested the photo. Instagram would never become so large if users occasionally experienced the unavailability of their content, no matter what the technical reason is.

• Based on our tests it may take up to 20 minutes to fetch a photo by its hash through IPFS, while the upper bound we can allow ourselves for robust user experience is a few seconds.

We plan to continue using centralized cloud as our primary storage, but we want to use IPFS as a secondary storage that could be addressed if there's something wrong with a user image in our centralized storage.

TL;DR if you want Instagram users to switch to Steepshot you should be able to provide at least the same quality of the service.