Writing an IPFS publishing service

# Introduction I started playing with IPFS because I wanted a different way of publishing data over the Internet. My first experiments with IPFS and a private swarm showed that the technology is useful, but the user experience is bad. It is easy to get an IPFS node running, but hard to make it useful in real world. The issue was not only that the protocol itself is complicated: IPFS is not a file server, it is a content-addressed system where files are identified by a CID, which is a hash of the content. This gives strong integrity guarantees, but it also means most people are puzzled by files addresses looking like `bafybeidbnzlne4dmw4ouep4ppb5zpzoye5t6uj32qpv76ifwm6wnehaygm`. The private IPFS swarm was not really good for the use case I had in mind, I wanted to easily publish content over IPFS and potentially allow friends to do so, but this required to handle some quota management. This is how I ended up writing a small middleware project, because IPFS already handled this with a…