One of our medium term objectives for @blockpress is to get it working on IPFS. If you haven't heard of IPFS, it is basically the decentralised web. It has its limitations, in that it can only really deliver static content. Static content includes html, css, images and of course javascript.

In theory this means BlockPress should be able to run from IPFS. And indeed it can...

IPNS Hash: QmafdY2xpTMhqqdF3WajsdQsEkkNN3nDYDTQCurKyDBcph

Via a gateway: https://gateway.ipfs.io/

There are some drawbacks with BlockPress in its current form as a candidate for an IPFS based decentralised site however. BlockPress has many files, multiple theme and image files, javascript libraries, template files and of course content. Once it has loaded, it works great, until you suddenly want content from another IPFS based file...

Steem content works fine, as no more IPFS files need to be loaded, but the kind of pages that BlockPress refers to as static, need to be reloaded each time they are accessed, and this becomes unforgivably slow.

I do have in mind solutions however. In fact we might produce a special "IPFS Edition" of BlockPress that minimises the number of file downloads required. But even regular BlockPress should work a lot better if we preload and cache the content for different pages accessed from the main menu.

Indeed, such an improvement would also be of benefit to BlockPress running on a centralised web server so it is a no-brainer.

Why is it important to run BlockPress on IPFS?

From the point of view of a steem user, the benefit is decentralisation. In this case decentralisation of the client. Imagine, hundreds of blockpress bases sites, each running in ipfs swarms. If centralised websites like steemit and busy were taken down for whatever reasons, these blockpress based ipfs sites would remain able to read steem content for as long as they were able to point at a valid API address. That in itself isn't fool proof, but such API addresses might be easier to keep open than websites.

In the long run, BlockPress should also allow posts, likes and comments, which means the steem blockchain could in theory survive and continue to grow, even if domain name based websites were taken down.

THAT is why this is important.

THAT is why blockpress is important. (One of many reasons anyway).