web3.storage VS ipfs-desktop

https://web3.storage/ https://estuary.tech/

I'm building Flash — a service to deploy websites and apps on the new decentralized stack. It relies on public infrastructure (such as Estuary, web3.storage and others) instead of providing its own, making the bandwidth and storage very cheap and accessible.

https://web3.storage/ does everything you need

Web3.Storage and other similar projects run a network of IPFS nodes that allow users to store whatever content they like, as a kind of competitor to Dropbox or Google Drive: this could be their personal content, or again, any application content, because some apps integrate directly with this service via their API

You can file this as an issue in the repo here and perhaps mention to them that, as a user, it feels phishy to you.

Typically app developers would be the ones to build on Filecoin and you would choose an app like web3.storage to store your data. As a consumer you dont have to directly hold FIL but you benefit from the Filecoin ecosystem.

Filecoin may not have a front-end but our team has worked on https://estuary.tech and it has been easy for our users that have an invite to onboard to the Filecoin Network, another great option is https://web3.storage

clone repos to your computer, dont just fork them

the fork disappears when the parent repository is taken down, clones stay on your machine

upload to IPFS. you can pin on IPFS for free with filecoin. Use filecoin nodes to pin on ipfs at https://web3.storage

As for storing data on Filecoin directly, that would require making a deal with a Filecoin Storage Provider; doing so is currently a complex task but reading the documentation should get you somewhere. You will need a small amount of the FIL token to make the deal with an SP, who will then store your data. Keep in mind that something like web3.storage or Estuary.tech may be better for your needs if you need easy access to the files later; Filecoin can (currently) be thought of as closer to archival storage, but efforts are being made to make it more generally useful too.

There are a few client options; the most widely used one (to my knowledge) is https://github.com/ipfs/kubo for CLI. There's also a desktop client that's pretty nice: https://docs.ipfs.tech/install/ipfs-desktop/

To be honest, this project aside, it's pretty cool and not to bad to get started with. On desktop, I would recommend the aptly named ipfs-desktop if you just want to try it out and get a good glance at all of the features. On android the ipfs-lite app is pretty straight forward though nowhere near the view into features the desktop app provides.

Install IPFS and then visit this page

IPFS works in china: https://docs.ipfs.tech/install/ipfs-desktop/

IPFS does serve traffic directly, and faster than through Cloudflare; if you run a local node. It accomplishes this by pre-caching content related to the content you access. So it is a bit network heavy. But I've been using it for about a year and the speed just can't be beat.

https://docs.ipfs.tech/install/ipfs-desktop/