We should ask ourselves, "how does the internet work and how do we interact with information?". On the internet, there is something called "protocols" (https is a protocol, for example), and they support theories on how to store and distribute information. At the beginning of the pandemic, something was introduced that may have much greater relevance now. As explained earlier, this is a new protocol for the internet: IPFS (Inter Planetary File System). IPFS (Inter Planetary File System).
Snippet from a video on the Simple Explained YouTube channel.
Unlike the previous box, IPFS stores information files in hashes (encrypted codes) and pins them to multiple hosts (servers or nodes) to store part of the information of that file in their cache. The encrypted file provides a reading address, which is the CID (Content Identifier), so that any IP address through a gateway can open it in a URL on the internet. Being stored in the cache of devices and not depending on a single gateway to the content, its value is perpetual. More relevant information about: what is a hash?, can be found here.
In fact, this webpage is stored on the IPFS protocol, which means that I cannot modify the content that is here when you read this, you can click here to verify the hash of this webpage and access it from different gateways. This web page is immutable, perpetual, and encrypted. You can read more information on how to store and create web pages on the IPFS protocol. here.
Here you can check how many nodes are online in real-time.
In this way, any of those can be used as a "gateway" to open the content through the internet. Simply add the domain to the list + CID (the key where the content is located). For example, the CID of a file (in this case, an image with metadata that describes it) is:
(url)/ipfs/bafybeicuhmvxgm3kmfrq2enp4fcv3zajdz6epnoms7icvg3vptyi4h52p4/image
Now, I prepend the gateway domain to point to the CID like this: https://cloudflare-ipfs.com + CID
As a result:
https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipfs/bafybeicuhmvxgm3kmfrq2enp4fcv3zajdz6epnoms7icvg3vptyi4h52p4/imagethrough another gateway from the list of online nodes + the same CID
https://gateway.pinata.cloud/ipfs/bafybeicuhmvxgm3kmfrq2enp4fcv3zajdz6epnoms7icvg3vptyi4h52p4/imageor another, etc:
https://ipfs.io/ipfs/bafybeicuhmvxgm3kmfrq2enp4fcv3zajdz6epnoms7icvg3vptyi4h52p4/imageany of the three will resolve to the same content.