If you are just hosting data for yourself, sure, go ahead and stick with a regular storage provider. IPFS is useful for the cases where there will be many people who will be accessing that data. The more popular a file is, the more nodes in the swarm will have it and the less it will be requested from your node specifically.
"Cheaper and simpler" only if you are comparing with sites hosted on some big cloud provider. Consider the case where you don't want or can't rely on, e.g, Cloudflare or AwS and ask yourself how you would serve lots of static data without worrying about bandwidth or getting DDOS.
it is content addressable, files are addressed by their hash, which means you can have a system, e.g, different Lemmy instance admins can share a IPFS server and it gets automatically deduplicated, or you can have something like trustless package managers that run without the need of a central authority.
Might not be useful for you, but it should be useful for a lot of people.
Because you won't be paying for distribution.
If you are just hosting data for yourself, sure, go ahead and stick with a regular storage provider. IPFS is useful for the cases where there will be many people who will be accessing that data. The more popular a file is, the more nodes in the swarm will have it and the less it will be requested from your node specifically.
So like torrenting?
If you could get a torrent file to display an image in your web browser, yes.
So regular web browser can browse IPFS only systems?
Yes. Brave has it built-in. Others can do it through an extension.
That's cool, still can't see why I wouldn't use http(s) though that is cheaper and simpler?
"Cheaper and simpler" only if you are comparing with sites hosted on some big cloud provider. Consider the case where you don't want or can't rely on, e.g, Cloudflare or AwS and ask yourself how you would serve lots of static data without worrying about bandwidth or getting DDOS.
OVH, Mega, insert lots and lots of other providers here. They probably can handle DDOS etc good enough.
I mean is it only for some niche usage (which is totally okay and fine) like serving lots of static data from lesser unknown providers then?
There are two aspects you are ignoring here:
with IPFS you can do it from your own computer
it is content addressable, files are addressed by their hash, which means you can have a system, e.g, different Lemmy instance admins can share a IPFS server and it gets automatically deduplicated, or you can have something like trustless package managers that run without the need of a central authority.
Might not be useful for you, but it should be useful for a lot of people.