See I thought if IPFS was picked up by the piracy scene (some bigger private trackers for example) then it probably would have been more successful. Alas I haven't seen it outside of libgen and even there I thought it was a backup option only.
I always thought it could be the evolution of Bittorrent: updatable torrents (with IPNS), peers sharing files from different "bundles" as long as the bits match.
The problem was that there was no good client for it that was better than current torrent clients. When I tested it you had to keep a duplicate of the files in the ipfs cache directory and the client was CLI based which would alienate most users. There's probably no way to have private trackers or to track seed/leech ratios for communities too.
It was also pretty slow (download rate wise), even if the destination and source node had a good link between them. I think the protocol had a lot of back-and-forth chatter, requesting blocks a few a time.
Arweave on the other hand will be getting some traction from the GTA 6 leaker. It's not good for all use cases because you need to buy storage with crypto instead of just running your own node but for small, valuable, rarely updated and heavily targeted files (like a website with illegal links) it's perfect.
I've always found Sam (one of the founders) to be a really good guy. I remember we went bouldering in Berlin when a lot of the early Arweave concepts were still coming out of his skull and we worked out a lot of it in conversation between boulder problems.
