Two things about this. First, the blog is also available at https://leotindall.com/ where it is just a regular website. I think it's _really_ interesting that the first thing that comes to mind is Medium and not, you know... a regular website.
Second, public IPFS gateways aren't the intended way to use the network. It's meant to be built into browser software, so each user acts as a mirror of what they're currently reading. Latency is high because the gateway is run by a nonprofit and they don't pay for ultrafast hardware for the public gateway.
There are a couple of advantages to places like Medium, Facebook, or Quora over a normal website.
The first is branding -- you get what you expect from a site. FB for personal connections (memes or distraction for others), curated content for Medium & Quora, etc. I remember using the web back in the 90s or so. I had committed to memory a dozen sites or so that I would visit every day. Slashdot, Yahoo News, ScaryGoRound etc. It was a bit stressful. Now I can just go to Reddit and just get distracted by whatever. Even curating your own Reddit experience is difficult, like it was for RSS. Most viewers of Reddit don't really create an account.
The second is ease of use for publishers. I'm not going to set up a website, even a Wordpress blog now if I can just go post content on Reddit or Medium where I have a chance of people reading it.
For Medium, I get what I expect: Some annoying "we've seen you here before" banner covering up the whole page. That usually doesn't happen for personal web pages.
> Latency is high because the gateway is run by a nonprofit and they don't pay for ultrafast hardware for the public gateway.
Isn't ipfs.io run by Protocol Labs? And didn't they raise something like $250M from the Filecoin ICO? Surely they can afford some fast gateway servers.
