I keep hearing this, but this is not a problem for the vast majority of people in the world. And IPFS is not a silver bullet for it anyway, because of the learning curve required to roll your own publishing stack. You can already host your own decentralized Mastodon instance without any blockchain.

Why is it that the numerous famous people that have gotten kicked off Facebook and Twitter never set up a blog or Mastodon instance on their own domain or use a platforms not controlled by American companies? It's because they know that the big platforms is where the people are, and trying to rebuild it all over again is not a waste of time and resources.

If that's all it does then it's a massive success.

IPFS has existed for years without any crypto involvement

Who says crypto has to be involved for it to be web3. Isn't being distributed (versus centralized) the defining characteristic?

The VC vision of Web3 is what is saturating the airwaves, and that absolutely has crypto front and center. Accessing anything considered 'Web3' currently requires a crypto wallet login, unless you're viewing a clearweb mirror version.

Who says we have to listen to the VCs?

Everyone who describes what web3 even is. If it's just decentralized, then web1 was web3.

But the infrastructure must be <somewhere>, right?

Of course, but the useful property is that it could be anywhere.

But over long enough time it _must_ be somewhere where somebody can provide Computational power and evergrowing storage capacity, right?

So.. not anywhere.

Or can the data be available in a highly fragmented fashion _and_ still be useful? I just can't imagine any content system that does not end up being centralized or highly inconvenient.

If someone cares about a piece of content's availability on IPFS, they can host it and anyone in the network can pull it from them without having to know a priori that they provide the content. That's what I mean by "anywhere". Anyone can provide any content they want, from anywhere, on whatever infrastructure they want, as long as there's a communication channel open with the rest of the network.

If you care about high availability of a piece of content, you will dedicate infrastructure to hosting it on IPFS, just like you would on the Internet.

Is there any need for the Blockchain for that? Like... Setup a server and host the content. I can't imagine it being simpler than that.

Why would I engage in the dance of crypto just to host some content no one will read anyway?

What's IPFS?

IPFS doesn't use a blockchain nor crypto. Conceptually the Internet is a set of protocols that together map (data-identifier, provider) -> bytes (e.g. GET https://<provider>/<data-identifier>). Similarly IPFS is a set of protocols that map (data-identifier) -> bytes.