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.
am I the only one who would advocate for text only storage: no. This comment also gets my point? There should be text only lemmy instances which only save text and do not allow any kind of image posting or storage.
- text is less offensive to consume and moderate than evil images or video
- text is way more information dense and can be even compressed more! Truly the green biosphere friendly data format. I would be willing to save text only data of strangers on my hard-drive, but not images or video. Could even be valuable llm analysis training data.
Yes people could post base64 encoded images, but that is a larger technical barrier and can be detected. If image storage is really need, images should be heavily compressed (webp 90% quality loss), provided as links to external sites, and whenever possible svg / vector graphics should be preferred.
anyway to use torrent protocol somehow? Like popcorn time did?
if it was easy to set up id definitely host a terabyte of Lemmy. As a pet.
IPFS?
as I stated in this comment it’s not really feasible as to ~5s delay that was tested some time ago.
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.
The sustainability of it is questionable. If I’m not mistaken, IPFS is based on Ethereum, which has gone over to proof of stake rather than proof of work, but it’s still a pretty cumbersome system.
We’re talking about something that needs to compete with Quic and CloudFlare. I’m not sure that Ethereum or even crypto itself is efficient enough as a content delivery method, that IPFS - though a nice idea - is unrealistic.
But that’s just speculation from someone who has zero knowledge behind IPFS as a technology and protocol, so take it with a grain of salt.
EDIT: honestly, why qualify with “I’m not sure” when besserwissers and their alts roam the fediverse instead of going to therapy. Smh. Give the people a Tl;Dr at least. I’m not here for long form content.
IPFS has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with Ethereum, or indeed any blockchain. It is a protocol for storing distributing and addressing data by hashes of the content over a peer to peer network.
There is however an initiative to create a commercial market for “pinning*”, which is blockchain based. It still has nothing to do with Ethereum, and is a distinct project that uses IPFS rather than being part of the protocol, thankfully. It is also not a “proof of work” sort of waste, but built around proving content that was promised to be stored is actually stored.
Pinning in IPFS is effectively “hosting” data permanently. IPFS is inherently peer to peer: content you access gets added to your local cache and gets served to any peer near you asking for it—like BitTorrent—until it that cache is cleared to make space for new content you access. If nobody keeps a copy of some data you want others to access when your machines are offline, IPFS wouldn’t be particularly useful as a CDN. So peers on the network can choose to pin some data, making them exempt from being cleared with cache. It is perfectly possible to offer pinning services that have nothing to do with Filecoin or the blockchain, and those exist already. But the organization developing IPFS wanted an independent blockchain based solution simply because they felt it would scale better and give them a potential way to sustain themselves.
Frankly, it was a bad idea then, as crypto grift was already becoming obvious. And it didn’t really take off. But since Filecoin has always been a completely separate thing to IPFS, it doesn’t affect how IPFS works in any way, which it continues to do so.
There are many aspects of IPFS the actual protocol that could stand to be improved. But in a lot of ways, it does do many of the things a Fediverse “CDN” should. But that’s just the storage layer. Getting even the popular AP servers to agree to implement IPFS is going to be almost as realistic an expectation as getting federated identity working on AP. A personal pessimistic view.
Personally I’m in the camp that I want history to be lost. That’s part of the appeal to me. In fact my favorite feature in the fedi is Mastodon’s option to enable auto-deleting posts of a certain age.
Only content that is explicitly pinned or reaches a certain amount of interactions should be saved imo. Since that’s the stuff you’d actually want to preserve rather than the 99% of forgettable content, and it would also drastically cut down on file hosting.
Another thing is that a federation should only act as the exchange between users on ActivityPub. It should only cache relevant information and not be expected to store everything, like I wrote before. The user should be a portable account that is stored on a device. The federation server would sync your account between your devices, but not store it. You send your content to the federation, and then the federation sends it out into the world where they choose to do what they want with it. The federation shouldn’t hoard it indefinitely.
Also this makes sense from a privacy perspective. If you care about privacy, why would you also want all your data indefinitely stored? Unless certain things are relevant and explicitly kept, it should be expected to expire and be lost by default. Where did we get this expectation that data should be stored forever? Also you expect it to be stored forever and not be trained on by AI?
This comment for example, after about a week or two most of the visibility and interaction of it will drop to zero. At that point, this comment should expire and no longer exist. I wrote this comment, it reached some people, and served it’s purpose and should expire. I’m not going to pretend like this comment is some kind of historic document that should be indefinitely preserved, nor do I expect or want it to be.
This comment for example, after about a week or two most of the visibility and interaction of it will drop to zero. At that point, this comment should expire and no longer exist.
That’s an incredible naive and egoistic take. Think about all the knowledge that is getting lost by applying this approach. How many times have you searched for some obscure thing and found the answer only on some five years old reddit post? That information would be lost for ever if you had your way.
Can you judge a work of art by it’s virality? Should you judge by virality?
A lot of times in history artists got recognition they deserved only after their death. When they ware alive they lived in poverty struggling to make ends meet.
There is a lot of internet 1.0 preserved by internet archive that I didn’t get to experience. There are flash games that I would love to preserve and show the next generation.
We wouldn’t have known how Scotts Cawthon games have looked like before he made FNAF if not for the preservation efforts.
Usually those artist did get some recognition during their life, but never got into the main stream. That changed due to the main stream changing and the people who did like the art showing it again. That is actually rather easy to do with something like the Fediverse. It just requires a download option. Especially when everybody is aware, that the content will be deleted, that would be a decent option.
Also a lot of content on social media in general is very short term. Stuff like politcal discussions are fairly useless after a few months in most cases. So that can be deleted without much care and again, if somebody wants to preserve it, they easily can just download it.
Too wet for server racks in the forest.
