yep, it's an honest attempt, but it have major failings. they made filecoin for the easy money. now they are trying to reverse engineer a decentralized network…because blockchains suck at scaling and, more importantly, storing data. They are great for storing data identifiers, but not the data. IPFS allows for a decentralized identifier database…but not the actual decentralization of the data…
AKA, IT IS NOT A SOLUTION TO THE REAL PROBLEM.
I'd recommend looking into Tim Berners-Lee's project SOLID. He and his team at MIT aren't some rag-tag crypto hipsters and they've been thinking about these problems for years. SOLID is a protocol for decentralized applications. It's pretty special and there is no cryptocurrency. It's just honest problem solving.
That said, it has a similar shortcoming in that one still has to choose where their personal data is stored, which could be anywhere. It's an improvement, but it's not full on privacy security and freedom. That's where the SAFE Network comes in. It has a crypto, but it also has the Scottish developers of the Saudi ARAMCO network. Decentralized networks need crypto for incentives to work. It's that simple, and SAFE is thinking about it very well. Check it out, but in short, it disintermediates the middlemen of the internet, the servers, by binding partitioned surplus memory from individuals into a giant distributed server. all files are copied for redundancy, sharded, and encrypted before being randomly spread out over the network. no blockchain at all, just your personal keys. lose those and the data is gone, but that's a real solution. IPFS can't do that.