I loved the video below about IPFS. There are many videos explaining how to use IPFS, but this one explain why we need it and some key concepts of this set of technology.
Internet has a big impact in our lives but relying in centralized servers is a big engineer error. Think about that:
- We are the owner of your data (data control) - nowadays our data is locked in different providers, who can delete, update or deny our access.
- We want to protect our data - centralized solutions lead to data leak. We worry so much about secure communication but many leaks happen because we do not have data security at rest. We do not control how servers store our data.
- We want free access of data – Many governments still deny access to some content to their population. We need a censorship resistance Web.
- We need to work even if we are offline (offline first) – The percentage of time spent in local apps is surprisingly increasing when compared with mobile web. Although it makes offline work possible, it isolates the data in the specific device and make software updates more difficult.
- We need to collaborate as much as possible – Why can I not edit a doc at the same time with a person besides me if the link to google is broken, for example? It should be possible to collaborate without relying in a specific link to a central server. Imagine how this could make a difference during a disaster!
- We still face latency issues - we have seen that storage prices are declining faster than bandwidth ones. We need a different way to save files around the world in order to reduce latency transmission.
IPFS is a set of technology that can help to solve these issues and bring us a better experience to many, many, many use cases.
I couldn't agree more. CDN can be useful for companies that work in a centralized mode, but it is not that good for the users as you said.
In addition, people who worry about privacy should know it is not a recommended solution to add encrypted data in IPFS, even though it may work or seem to work good (reference: https://github.com/ipfs/ipfs/issues/86#issuecomment-137755902).