[antiffan]

This feels a bit to me like saying: "electric cars still have to charge their batteries somewhere, and they aren't necessarily being charged with renewable energy."

Electric cars provide the capability to power a car with renewable energy. Powering the grid with electric energy is a separate problem.

IPFS provides the capability of distribution. Incentivizing pinning is indeed a separate problem, but providing this capability feels like a huge step forward to me.

[bordercases]

Likewise if the process of distribution was automated there would be people complaining about opt-in being a waste of their own resources for content they don't care about, or something.

[zeta0134]

Exactly this. I don't understand why this is being thrown about like it's a bad thing; I gladly pinned all of Wikipedia, but it's also a huge amount of data and I made sure I was prepared to follow through before I asked my IPFS node to do it. If there's content out there that has earned my respect, I'll pin it gladly just to help the authors out, especially if they ask me politely.

To be fair, some of this is automated. If you browse using your own node, it does maintain a small cache, which helps with the load distribution when something gets really popular. This blog post is a good example; despite literally being the #1 item on HN, it's still up; that's the global IPFS cache at work. It's slower than the average site, sure, but it didn't outright vanish, even though the author clearly is using minimal resources to actually host it. I think that's awesome.

[adrianN]

More realistically it would have the same complains as services like Freenet. You are in legal limbo if you just host random stuff and it's not too unlikely to get all your equipment confiscated.