Yes containerd supports pulling images from IPFS: https://github.com/containerd/nerdctl/blob/main/docs/ipfs.md

Except you need to pay for pinning IPFS files to actually persist. And there-in lies the crux. People don't got money to pay for their small time docker containers.

The cost of some of the IPFS hosts that will give you a dropbox of sorts still end up costing roughly the $20/month similar to the Docker $25/month for a team account.

I was just thinking this seems like an ideal use case for IPFS or bittorrent, since most users will already be running on a server.

It doesn't seem unreasonable to have the client automatically pin/seed the container it pulls.

This has been happening recently with Helm chart repositories etc. Maybe it's time people started hosting their own Container Registries?

The huge bandwidth requirements are an incentive to keep images small.

Would it be possible to build something on top of DHT+Torrent? Main issue seems around image discovery.

Hit me up if you want to discuss using BitTorrent to back images. https://github.com/anacrolix/torrent

What work needs to be done? Provision a server somewhere and host it. AWS has one-click "give me a docker hub" and "give me a git hub" products.