I'm currently building a peer-to-peer search engine for it. I will be uncensorable and private, as all things should be. We have seen nothing of what can be done on IPFS yet
Besides being overhyped basic tech where way more useful and practical solutions existed for decades (Freenet existed since year 2000 btw, and Tahoe-LAFS since 2007), there is nothing private about IPFS. This is a dangerous message to purport.
IPFS is as practically useful as NFTs. No wonder the two crowds connected well!
iroh is an attempt to create a useful and practical IPFS. But none of the bigger practical features is implemented yet. And the design itself doesn't appear to be finalized. I'm willing to give iroh a chance, although the close proximity to the IPFS crowd doesn't fill one with confidence.
You are right, notice the use of future when I talk about privacy. What's great with IPFS is that it's based on libp2p. Libp2p makes it easy to add support for any transport protocol you like. If your transport protocol is private (tor, i2p...), then the whole protocol on top of it (ipfs, my search engine) is private. I'm pretty sure it was a choice for them to refuse adding support for private transports, because they don't want illegal activity on ipfs, thinking it's too early. But it's inevitable in the long run
There is no need to talk about an imaginary version of IPFS. GNUnet already exists. You can add that to the list of actually superior technologies that long predates IPFS.
As I mentioned, IPFS is nothing but very basic tech that got overhyped to junior/uninformed developers, and crypto scam victims.