I work with IPFS so it would be very handy to know what you feel is slow exactly. We're working our hardest to make it as fast as possible but sometimes we fall through, so more information so we can fix it would be wonderful!

Most "slowness" is related to content that is either relatively fresh on the network or or rare content.

If my node is the only one seeding the file, accessing it via gateway.ipfs.io is slow but it's pretty obvious why; I'm the only provider.

So while for very public content IPFS is rather fast, if you share a couple files with a few friends, it's a bit slower.

Of course, this all depends on upload/download speeds, mine aren't stellar in both directions either.

Plus I'm rather certain that my ISP is throttling any kind of P2P traffic.

Ah, I understand. Yeah, it's not much we can do about that but in the future it can be expected that you'll be able to use some sort of service to help you with the initial seeding of the content.

So instead of you sharing a file from your home connection and five friends have to share that, you'll share your file with some hosting provider and once they have the file, you'll just send the same hash to your friends and you'll have at least 2 nodes providing the file.