Exactly. It's not a community, it's more a tool for publishing content that other people consciously decide to follow. The point being that this content can't be shut down by a central organization, but will disappear if nobody cares about it.
They're stored as HTML, because of the WYSIWYG nature of the editor. I guess Markdown was the other obvious choice, but editing MD is not so immediate on mobile.
So, the article is coming slowly or not coming at all because two of the four bootstrappers are timing out and, if you're unlucky enough to hit one of them, it might take minutes to replicate the article content. Bug has been reported to the js-ipfs guys and a pull request has been merged: https://github.com/ipfs/js-ipfs/pull/1693
That was instructive and I'm glad the experience has resulted in people getting interested, questions being asked and bugs being fixed. Sorry if it didn't work perfectly, distributed stuff is hard. I don't understand the flagging but hey, HN will be HN, I guess :)
I will fix the issue in the next days and will keep on developing Vitriol. Obviously any help is appreciated. Thanks to everyone for your comments!
It is. I'm using OrbitDb, so the data structures in the ipfs node are not the ones you'd expect. Also, it needs to load at least three nodes to get to the article - that's a necessary trade off to have user metadata and user feeds. If it wasn't for the bootstrappers timing out it would have worked almost instantly. That's cool, bug has been reported.