The "original" web3 before the cryptocurrency scammers claimed the term was all about the decentralized web with protocols like IPFS backing them. With IPFS, someone needs to host the data (either yourself or some service you pay) but the more popular your data is, the more hosts will have it cached and the quicker and cheaper the content loads.

Even now, after the surge of cryptocurrency gambling, products like NFTs often leverage IPFS to store data, since the blockchains themselves are absolutely useless for actually storing information and nobody wants their decentralized system to rely on someone else's server.