Is IPFS mature and reliable? Genuine question. I've always been curious about, but never had a need for it. Since it didn't take over the world as we know it, I believe something must be missing yet.
Seems like it's momentum is gone and if you haven't interacted with it yet you probably shouldn't bother.
I think this is mostly a UI thing, not an improvement to the underlying technology. IIRC it's technically possible to "stream" from torrents or download chunks of them, it's just not the default way people interact with them.
In theory that allows some extremely powerful things, such as making all the content of the world part of your filesystem. You can just "cd /ipfs/<long hash>/" and browse around whatever directory tree you are interested in. It completely bypasses the need to manually download anything, as you can access the data directly under a globally unique name.
IPFS is also much more suited for small files, so you could use it to host individual .jpg files, something that would be rather unwieldy with torrent.
In actual use however it barely works, it's slow, it's eats lots of CPU even when doing nothing and the fuse plugin to integrate it into your filesystem is also rather broken. POSIX file io is also ill suited for this kind of transparent file access, so all your apps will just freeze without any indication what is going on if you try to use the /ipfs/ directory.
Another huge problem with IPFS is the complete lack of authorship/copyright tracking. HTTP has that implicitly, since whoever hosts the content is responsible for it. With something like IPFS however you automatically become hoster for everything you look at. I can't see that working in the current legal system. Even distributing Open Source projects via IPFS is already illegal, as the LICENSE.txt you are generally required to redistribute no longer is linked with the actual rest of the source code once you can address and cache each file, or even blocks within a file, individually. If IPFS would ever become popular it would be quickly made unusable by lawyers, as unlike torrent, you downloading is not an active act here, it just happens in the background.
>Since it didn't take over the world as we know it, I believe something must be missing yet.
Not sure that's how it works, good ideas get buried all the time.