This gave me a flashback to pre-web days, when I was in a developing country as a kid, and:

- used "FTP via email"

- connected via a national call ($$) to a shell account

- used pine to copy+paste email text into local files and vice-versa

- assembled segmented files by hand, then decoded and decompressed

- all on a Mac Portable

You might be interested in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Paquete_Semanal

Does IPFS do a good job of intermittently-online mostly-offline nodes with potentially non-linear updates?

Been spitballing the same concepts but with mobile phones (on a person or stashed on aircraft doing their weekly freight/mail run) where unused space is the bandwidth. Can move hundreds of gbs at zero cost but meh latency, as you’re imagining.

Not by default. You need to figure out how to connect to the network, which works great if you know how to reach other nodes - but in the small cell scenario? I don't believe they have a reliable local network discovery.

I haven't seen anything IPFS does better than bittorent.

It can reference separate files and repackage existing files into new directories. For some kinds of usage, that's a massive benefit.

In my experience, IPFS doesn't even do a good job of fully-online updates. Maybe my setup was bad, but I couldn't get it to reliably and quickly discover content on other nodes that were definitely online.