There was some talk of this issue in the recent fediverse inefficiencies thread. I'm hopeful that in the future we'll have a decentralized solution for file hosting but for now I deeply believe that users should pay for their own file hosting.

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[–] moon@lemmy.cafe 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

To actually keep data persistent on IPFS and not be deleted by the garbage collector, you need to have a server(s) pin the node that holds that data.

You either host these servers yourself, or pay providers to store it for you.

And at that point you just reinvented a server simply hosting your data but with extra steps.

[–] sosodev@lemmy.world 3 points 2 days ago

Thank you for pointing that out. I'm not familiar with IPFS but I tend to agree there's no free lunch here. People think you can wave the blockchain wand and free computing appears but there's always costs built in somewhere.