For the past week, I have been looking at one of the claims of IPFS that it can provide citizens in countries with censorship laws to access censored content. The website I have looked at in particular is wikipedia, a common resource for people looking to get acquainted with an unfamiliar subject.
The team behind IPFS have created and maintained snapshots of wikipedia in various languages, with a focus on those whose governments have censored wikipedia, such as Myanmar, China, and formerly Turkey. However, these are read only snapshots taken by volunteers, and are updated infrequently. For example, on the english wikipedia snapshot, the page of Queen Elisabeth II still portrays her as alive. The reason for these infrequent updates can partially be attributed to the cumbersome process of taking a new snapshot, which can be found here, https://github.com/ipfs/distributed-wikipedia-mirror#how-to-add-new-wikipedia-snapshots-to-ipfs
though a simple explanation is that a local ipfs node needs to be configured, a snapshot downloaded and extracted from a third party and the data has to be added to the ipfs node, which is a lengthy process and disk space hungry, the english wikipedia is over 250gb.
Though these are issues that need to be resolved, they are not crippling to the average user experience, as the vast majority of articles do not require constant revision. However, a more pressing problem is that the snapshot, being hosted on IPFS, is only the link to a single page, and does have have a search function associated with it, so the only way to traverse wikipedia is through the links on the site itself, which can be a fun game to compete in with friends, but is a tedious experience when trying to look up something specific.
Another issue is the accessibility of these snapshots. IPFS supports mapping a DNS link to an IPFS address, allowing the cumbersome and unreadable /ipfs/QmT5NvUtoM5nWFfrQdVrFtvGfKFmG7AHE8P34isapyhCxX/wiki/ to become tr.wikipedia-on-ipfs.org
however, if censorship is truly an issue, DNS resolution can be blocked if the query contains sensitive content, so users can choose to go through public gateways instead, but even then a degree of trust must be placed in the maintainers of these gateways, which can be alot of ask of a citizen of a country whose own government does not trust them. The most reliable and secure way then, of accessing a page is by using its content identifier (CID), which can be troublesome to obtain. A comparison can be drawn from BitTorrent seeds, if the system is missing some piece due to premature departure of seeds, no seeds can be made unless a seed returns to the system. Similarly, a community that has the CID is able to pass it around, or unchoke in the BitTorrent comparison, but obtaining it in the first place requires specific domain knowledge which may not be available.
Finally, the only real way to obtain and distribute CIDs is to exchange them between peers, though there is a rudimentary search engine at https://ipfs-search.com/#/, though its functionality is a far cry from what we have come to expect from modern search engines such as google, the search results seem to only return a regular expression match on the exact search query, without any obvious ordering, and certainly not be relevence.
Overall, storing snapshots of wikipedia is a workable solution, however it is still tedious to use and likely only familiar in the first place to people who would have the means to use other methods to bypass censorship, such as vpns.