This is closer to a shower thought, given I don’t really know much about how ActivityPub works. Has anyone, or is it even possible to, made an instance designed to work as say a FUSE file system?
I was mostly just thinking about how hard UIs are to make and thought “what if the content was the UI”.
Pretty sure that’s exactly what IPFS is, it’s a distributed filesystem, although it’s also a Blockchain-based technology so it comes with that baggage
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think IPFS itself is tied to a blockchain. That said, the creators seem to be involved in a lot of crypto stuff (including creating Filecoin on top of IPFS), so it does have blockchain baggage attached to it.
I thought the blockchain paid you for your hosting contribution and linked to the chunks on your instance so people knew where to look.
No, the latter is done via a DHT, while the former is a layer on top of IPFS (Filecoin, I guess, as verdare said). Default IPFS behaviour is that you just cache whatever you download, and serve it to others if they request the same file from the network. Basically a huge bittorrent kinda thing.