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I don't think IPFS is the solution. It's expensive, unreliable, and overkill when the majority of people's photos don't need to be decentralized (and the majority of users don't care). If someone wants to solve this problem, they should focus on building a great team that is capable of launching, maintaining, and scaling software that adds unique value. Any effort that fails to do this, regardless of whether it's centralized or decentralized, will (and should) go away.

I am surprised you think that. Considering busy.org uses IPFS for images to my knowledge. IPFS is a lot more efficient than traditional system, especially when talking about gateway/local node caching. A lot less usage on main servers. There is a few issues with IPFS regarding resource usage, this is fixed with changing settings. If a dapp had end users storing files/images, it wouldnt matter what the devs are doing to keep up the platform because the structure is made of community nodes.

IPFS and social media make a great match together. Not sure where you got the the idea that ipfs or p2p is expencive. I'd like to remind you of the 2000s, and the things that happened back then . Having photos on ipfs is ideal as they take much less time to load ( when a local node caches the file).

https://torrentfreak.com/peer-to-peer-traffic-statistics/

My final point and this isn't an attack, I appreciate a lot of vision steemit Inc holds.. If Steemit Inc's (centralized cloud system ) was so great , why does steemit, Amazon, etc have high downtime when compared to p2p? http://deadline.com/2018/10/youtube-down-outage-youtube-tv-youtube-music-1202484389

When we have 50 nodes , p2p uptime is 100% and can be held up to this high, unmatched standard for many years . I've tried to reach steemit.com already ,so far ( and it's a tiny site) for many hours and it failed to load. Why is this? Oh.. they used aws.. a centralized.. very expensive service. Vs having a system similar to the one described by torrent freak in 2005 2006.
IPFS is newer than torrents. Even so, it's still highly reliable... If you think ipfs is unreliable. It's possible that you tried to leech unseeded files. Try files that have many pins ( or seeds ). Like the videos hosted with oneloveipfs.com. Anyone can deploy ipfs anywhere. In any garage. Similar to how Bitcoin started. People can truly earn/mine through the transfer of value in content. Like videos. Yes. It will work, already does work. And has worked for decades in different environments. BBS systems and people like Jack Rickard made sure of that. These systems won't go away they will continue to gain development. Take a moment to listen to the innovator vint Cerf and his thoughts about the future internet and p2p.

And If you really want to go deep into Internet technology's history, Here is how it ALL started.

Thank you popcorn bot. Ned didn't keep you down for long <3.