> Agree, but currently, ipfs would serve as a fallback, since it's about files.
Isn't a CDN fundamentally all about files too?
> Decentralized/distributed generally has slower network performance. Unless most nodes are high performance, I guess?
There is definitely more work to do here before this is really useful, but it's well within the realm of things that IPFS should be able to do at reasonable performance for production sites in future. Good performance still requires a serious CDN node network similar to traditional CDNs today (to seed your content for day to day use) but with IPFS if that CDN goes down then existing users on your site can _also_ serve the site to other nearby users directly, or other CDNs can serve your site too, etc etc. Your DNS wouldn't be linked to any specific CDN in any way, just to the hash of the content itself, so anybody could serve it.
> Decentralizing the internet works if it financially makes sense for platforms to build such tools.
There's a platform company called Fleek who already do this today: https://fleek.co/hosting/ (no affiliation, and I've never even used the product, just looks cool). Seems to be designed as a Netlify competitor: push code with git and it builds it into static content and then deploys to IPFS.
The benefits don't exist today of course, because no browsers natively support IPFS, so most users can only access the content via an IPFS gateway, which means you're back to fully centralized server infrastructure again... If we can get IPFS support into browsers though then fully decentralized CDN infrastructure for the web is totally possible.
Isn't a CDN fundamentally all about files too?
> Decentralized/distributed generally has slower network performance. Unless most nodes are high performance, I guess?
There is definitely more work to do here before this is really useful, but it's well within the realm of things that IPFS should be able to do at reasonable performance for production sites in future. Good performance still requires a serious CDN node network similar to traditional CDNs today (to seed your content for day to day use) but with IPFS if that CDN goes down then existing users on your site can _also_ serve the site to other nearby users directly, or other CDNs can serve your site too, etc etc. Your DNS wouldn't be linked to any specific CDN in any way, just to the hash of the content itself, so anybody could serve it.
> Decentralizing the internet works if it financially makes sense for platforms to build such tools.
There's a platform company called Fleek who already do this today: https://fleek.co/hosting/ (no affiliation, and I've never even used the product, just looks cool). Seems to be designed as a Netlify competitor: push code with git and it builds it into static content and then deploys to IPFS.
The benefits don't exist today of course, because no browsers natively support IPFS, so most users can only access the content via an IPFS gateway, which means you're back to fully centralized server infrastructure again... If we can get IPFS support into browsers though then fully decentralized CDN infrastructure for the web is totally possible.