You do. IPFS isn't Freenet, you're not contributing to some global pool of amorphous storage. It's just like running a webserver, but with content-based addres

You do. IPFS isn't Freenet, you're not contributing to some global pool of amorphous storage. It's just like running a webserver, but with content-based addressing, the possibility of having multiple machines provide the same content and much more convenient mirroring than over HTTP. If you start an IPFS node, it'll remain empty until you upload something, or pin (copy) somebody else's content. I think your node might also cache requests you make to it for some time, but that's also something that's a result of you asking for it.