Problem

At the moment I have 3 IPFS nodes running on my machine embedded by following applications

• IPFS Desktop
• Textile Desktop
• Radicle Service

And when I'll start test driving anytype I'll likely end up with 4 nodes.

It is not ideal, because:

• IPFS is resource intensive (On my Macbook Pro IPFS Node drains battery about 5 times faster than without). That multiplied by 3x (or possibly more as more apps become popular) is terrifying.
• As user I would like a canonical place for the data stored by apps to be aggregated at, instead it gets scattered around bunch of IPFS nodes. That also means there is no simple way for me to mirror data on other nodes (sever or other device). More broadly current situation does not align with WebOS vision.
• We are replicating data silos that we hate from the conventional web, sure data isn't gated behind corporate server farm but if user can't easily interact with data trapped in other app embedded node end result is not much different. _(With the caveat that here you can copy dataset across nodes, but propagating changes across nodes is non trivial & apps generally don't have a good story even for doing copying).

Proposal

ipfs daemon and ipfs tool and library should by default should attempt to discover if IPFS service is already running and if so just act as a frontend to it, otherwise spawn a service and still act as a frontend to it. That would make all embedders by default share same IPFS node. Dealing with version incompatibilities is going to be an interesting challenge, but even if this would address problem for same versioned nodes that would be a good step forward IMO.