For web pages, you could imagine a sort of universal "like" button which pins the page locally and bookmarks it. I think it's less about incentives and more about convenience -- people are happy to help out if it's not too much trouble for them.
People don't give a damn about helping you, and will unpin any site as soon as it becomes a resource drain. And over time, they will learn that's unpredictable, and nobody wants to be a site admin, and so nobody will pin things.
I thought the last 20 years on the Internet have shown us that "humanity is noble, and good" isn't true, and we should assume "evil and/or lazy".
Yes, but keep in mind that, like BitTorrent, IPFS also includes a thing where nodes are given preferential treatment based on seed/leech ratio - so you're incentivized to help host content, and just the stuff you can share while downloading yourself might not be enough.
So yes, they will "unpin any site as soon as it becomes a resource drain" unless they're feeling particularly charitable - but that's exactly how it works with torrents, too! Generally you set up rules like "seed until a maximum up/down ratio is reached for that file, then don't bother", "restrict uploads to a certain maximum speed and/or certain maximum amount of data per day", that kind of thing. I figure you'd basically have an automatically-managed cache of limited size that you'd use to hold the stuff you were liking-to-pin, and stuff that was judged to be no longer worth seeding would get kicked off, as would old/unpopular content if the cache had filled up and you were shuffling in new content.
So unpinning anything that becomes a significant resource drain is also - at least in the relatively-short-to-medium-term - fully compatible with other people being willing to "like" your site to pin it, if not perpetually, than for an extended period of time.
There's plenty of media/webpages I'd love to "save offline" on WiFi so I could then later access them without having to pay for mobile data (or access them at all on flights/road trips through areas with no phone service)
(Note that I am aware that for many pages you can, in fact, do this already. Downloading HTML is a thing. I just meant that since I can already do this, it would be nice if I could both do this and have it integrate seamlessly with my browser for navigating links and host those files for other people while on WiFi I was at it)
Save as HTML is often completely broken. Especially when javascript injects <script> tags to load even more javascript. You're better off by using archive.org's wayback machine.
I don't know what your personal circumstances are, but your tone here sounds like you need to take some time away from the internet, for your own mental health.
It's a huge oversimplification to describe people in just those terms. People are complicated and so are their motivations, and it's hard to tell in advance which new things will be successful or not.
For example, I once worked for a guy who hadn't heard of open source and, when I described the concept to him, couldn't wrap his brain around why so many people would take the time to write and maintain a bunch of software and then just give it away. This is not the work product of "evil and/or lazy" people.
I don't think it's a mental health issue for me that the tragedy of the commons extends to the Internet. This is not about "not knowing", this is about prioritizing self interest and actively abusing the system.
We know these two things happen, consistently. We have failed to account for them in much of the foundations of the Internet - it's the assumption of benevolent cooperation. Which was great for ARPAnet, but simply doesn't work in the wild. We have 20+ years of proof.
We cannot continue to put our heads in the sand and ignore that, because for better or worse, the Internet has become a major force shaping society.
The idea that naivete translates into mental health is certainly fascinating, but I believe the colloquial translation for that is "ignorance is bliss".
The tragedy of the commons depends a lot on the nature of the commons. People can and do work together to manage common resources. You can check out the work of Elinor Ostrom for some examples.
If most people use smartphones to consume content on metered internet connections with limited battery life, where do they pin it such that it's available to others?
In one futurist vision, your home router/gateway modem could provide this service (and also be powerful enough to host game servers if you start up their clients on your phone while on that modem’s LAN.)
A lot of people still have a "real" computer they do a lot of browsing on - it's just increasingly that "real computer" is a laptop, rather than a desktop, computer.
Let's assume these figures are useful as a first approximation of the number of hours of laptop usage per laptop owner in 2018. I'm not saying it's a perfect match, just that they're likely to be better than figures you or I would pull out of the air.
Taking the centre of each band, assuming "more than 10 hours" means "10 to 16 hours", and excluding the "no computers" band, gives a mean of 4.3 hours per day. So each laptop is active roughly 18% of the time.
That's more than I expected, but it still means you're going to need a lot of people to pin the content before you have a 99% chance of at least one copy being online at any given time.
Edit: As far as I can tell, with 18% uptime you need 15 copies for 99% reliability (assuming no correlation between the online times of the various copies, which is optimistic - in reality there will be strong daily and weekly cycles).
Maybe just publish what you've downloaded while charging. Much like most intensive things like say picture backups that often are done only on wifi and only when charging.
