Ok cool, I love decentralized content distribution frameworks too. But what do I have to install to use it? As with most of these attempts to decentralization, it fails because of the mostly absent effort spent on ease of use.
Less than 5% of people are what most people would describe as coders and from my experience, I would say less than a third of those are not afraid of using a terminal. Why do you think people still pay for IDEs and fancy git clients with a UI? And of that, only a tiny fraction would have heard of decentralized social media / websites.
If these kind of projects want any global attention then they should be as easy to install as most applications on Android or Apple. Bitcoin began becoming popular when easy to use wallet applications and currency exchange began being mainstream. Same for BitTorrent, Signal and IRC.
GUI options to use it exist. You can use IPFS via the IPFS Desktop client or just use the Brave browser which has support for it build in. That said, if you want to actually host anything on IPFS yourself, you need the CLI client so you can throw it on a Raspberry Pi or something.
Anyway, I think the much bigger problem to IPFS adaption is that IPFS barely works. In terms of features IPFS should be capable of replacing every single mirror server out there, but in reality nobody is doing that. Having run IPFS permanently in the background also uses way more CPU than is acceptable for a software that is mostly just idling around. And the 'ipfs mount' option completely fails to scale with bigger directories. IPFS also has a serious lack of support for encryption and privacy, everything you do on IPFS is essentially public. Search is another thing missing on IPFS, https://ipfs-search.com/ exists, but if you try use it, 95% of the results are non-working links.
IPFS isn't really at a point where you want average users to use it, they'd just be disappointed and uninstall it immediately again. But if you want to play with it, it's really nothing more than a few clicks away. It is already pretty easy to use right now, no matter if GUI or CLI. Even with nothing installed or configured you can still use the proxy server that make IPFS available by HTTP.
Layer 2 solutions that focus on ease-of-use and other properties to make these technologies become more mainstream are starting to emerge. One such solution is Filebase, which offers an S3 compatible abstraction layer to Sia, Storj and other decentralized networks. You can use any S3 compatible tool right out of the box, or simply drag and drop.
