The fediverse's decentralized nature poses a vexing file hosting conundrum - how can we sustainably support the community's voracious appetite for shared media?

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.

  • Fuck YankiesEnglish
    31·
    15 days ago

    TL;Dr. From Wikipedia

    IPFS allows users to host and receive content in a manner similar to BitTorrent. As opposed to a centrally located server, IPFS is built around a decentralized system of user-operators who hold a portion of the overall data. Any user in the network can serve a file by its content address, and other peers in the network can find and request that content from any node who has it using a distributed hash table (DHT).

    So it’s BitTorrent in the web browser… thanks. How is that to be competitive with CloudFlare and Quic again? It has the same network issues that the blockchain has, in that it will be cumbersome and slow - for anyone else that doesn’t have millions to throw into infrastructure. Welcome to the same problem again, but in a different way.

    • Scio@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      15 days ago

      Ironically, because there’s no UDP in browsers, we can’t actually get proper p2p on the web. WebRTC through centralized coordination servers at best. Protocol Labs has all but given up on this use-case in favor of using some bootstrapped selection of remote helper nodes.