Disclaimer: I wrote this article and made this website.
There was some talk of this issue in the recent fediverse inefficiencies thread. I’m hopeful that in the future we’ll have a decentralized solution for file hosting but for now I deeply believe that users should pay for their own file hosting.
Ok, hear me out.
We find the users with the slowest internet and start sending them all the data. They don’t have to keep anything on disk. Then they send it all back and forth between each other. Any time a user makes a request, we just wait for one of the slow nodes to come across the data and send it out.
We use the slowest wires for all the storage. It’s fool proof.
Somebody actually did make this as a joke years ago haha https://github.com/yarrick/pingfs
I was brushing my teeth when reading this comment and inadvertently ended up swallowing all my toothpaste.
don’t forget to spit
Ha! That’s awesome!
Top 5 YouTube videos this one
This is amazing and I love it.
anyway to use torrent protocol somehow? Like popcorn time did?
Ipfs would be similar but more purpose based
Never heard of that for, it looks exactly built for this problem, better than torrent. Good call.
this is actually a super interesting idea of which i have never seen proof of concept. other than maybe freenet or something.
if it was easy to set up id definitely host a terabyte of Lemmy. As a pet.
What would you name your pet
IPFS?
What would an IPFS solution look like here? That’s a genuine question. I don’t have much experience with IPFS. It seems like it isn’t really used outside of blockchain applications.
Is a p2p system for media with the instances just hosting magnet links too slow for fediverse purposes? To me this seems like the most resilient way to handle media in a decentralized system
If a social network is to take off, it must be accessible from mobile devices behind CGNAT (carrier grade network address translation).
Is file hosting really a must? I mean Reddit and feddit are basically forums. And not many forums allow file uploads. Also, we should have retention limits. Low value posts are allowed to fade away. High value posts that have some level of interaction stay alive longer.
I wish there was some version of PBS for Lemmy, like public funds for hosting. I’ll admit I haven’t really thought this through, so there’s probably some problems with my idea.
This feels like something the Fediverse is ultimately going to build for itself. I know jack squat about the details, but it’s gonna have to be a thing eventually, I think.
I think Tenfingers could be an interesting option as hosters do not know what they host, the data can be modified, and it’s 100% decentralised.
Thank you for writing this. Small typo: focued (focused).
Thanks for reading and pointing out that typo! (I fixed it)
What is stopping some big giant, let’s say Yahoo/Verizon from buying a shitload of storage, starting their own private instance which is open to the public, but private in the sense that only Verizon employees are admins and mods. Only Verizon controls things. Then advertise to the point that the average person on the street knows that Verizon.Lemmy exists, and assosiates Lemmy with being a Verizon thing? What is stopping big tech from pouring the money required for this concept to take off, and using their control over their instance from making the decentralized a centralized service in the general public’s minds?
Right now Lemmy is 60k people. Ok. What if Lemmy was 200 million people, and only 60k knew it was a decentralized service? Everyone else just thought Verizon owned Lemmy?
This is literally exactly what happened to email. It didn’t go great
