Any particular reason for choosing IPFS instead of bittorrent or other p2p protocols? It feels like every time I try an IPFS tool it just crashes, whereas I rarely have issues with torrents.
Yeah - the desire to have TeaTime run as a normal website. BitTorrent doesn't run over HTTP, unless you use WebTorrent, which most BitTorrent clients aren't 100% compatible with. This means you can basically only download from other WebTorrent nodes - and there aren't many.
I do think this might change with the introduction of things like the Direct Sockets API, but for now they are too restricted and not widely supported.
It's my first time working with IPFS and I agree it hasn't always been 100% reliable, but I do hope that if I manage to get TeaTime users to also be contributing nodes, this might actually improve the reliability of the whole network. Once it's possible to use BitTorrent in the browser, I do think it would be a great addition (https://github.com/bjesus/teatime/issues/3).