Replying to How to make Nixpkgs more eco-friendly / use less resources - #47 by nixinator here to not take the other thread more off-topic.
Glad you’ve taken a look!
IPFS doesn’t rely on use of the DHT — you can always connect to a peer directly and it asks existing peers regardless of “who” the main DHT says you should ask.
For the SWH ↔ IPFS bridge, for example, we completely ignored the DHT to start, saying there will just be a dedicated bridge node with a well known address, and one can connect to that.
(I believe one can also get peers from peers, which means that a bandwidth-saturated bridge node could in principle prioritize letting all its wannabe peers know who each other are, so they can act together as a CDN.)
Bottom line is the architecture is very modular, and one can experiment with many different strategies. I think our use-cases (distributing source code from archive, distributing builds) are great ones to test various strategies with too.