Er, I meant pre-beta not pre-alpha. It's still in development. Sounds like the core API is pretty much settled and not expected to change (much).
Building a platform is not like building an app. And a platform that changes significant parts of internet infrastructure is different from just building any platform. I worked on Firefox for 13 years... the internet is a harsh and fickle thing.
That said, people are using IPFS with millions of users today.
I very much agree about the rhetoric. The homepage is polished, and speaks to a bunch of features that are possible to varying extents in varying environments, but not easy to demonstrate. Bandwidth savings is a good example of this.
IPFS is useful to blockchain projects because of the permanence of content hashes. That doesn’t mean it’s not also useful to many others. QRI is using it as the publishing medium and backing store for all kinds of data sets, for example. No blockchain, just shared storage across interested parties.
You make a really good point about communicating readiness - the author of the post is expecting more from pre-alpha software than it is ready to provide.
Yes, IPFS addresses some of the use-cases of HTTP while solving other problems where HTTP falls short. It isn't a complete drop-in replacement, but does set up a foundation for an internet that will last longer and (at some point) perform better across varying network conditions.
> but I think this is (vaguely) analogous to building
> a website based on IP addresses and port numbers, not URIs.
IPNS is a naming solution designed to address this:
It's not super fast right now, but there's some work happening now to make it much faster.
ENS, the Ethereum name system, is also an emerging way of doing this.
> basically be this URI resolution map
IPLD is a data model that works with IPFS to address the use-case you're describing, where you have a permanent reference to a mutable set of data: https://ipld.io/
https://norman.life/posts/ipfs-bittorrent