I’ve been day dreaming about a social media platform built entirely on a peer-to-peer (P2P) model, leveraging the existing BitTorrent protocol. The idea is to decentralize content creation, distribution, and moderation, eliminating the need for centralized servers and control.
Here’s the high-level vision:
- Posts as Torrents: Every original post creates and seeds a torrent file on behalf of the OP.
- Upvotes as Seeds: Upvoting a post downloads and seeds the post, reinforcing its availability.
- Comments as Torrents: Each comment generates and seeds a torrent file somehow linked to the original post.
- Comment Upvotes as Seeds: Upvoting a comment downloads and seeds the comment, amplifying engagement.
- Text Only: to avoid exposing users to potentially graphic content (due to lack of centralized moderation) this platform would initially be limited to text content only. This would also drastically reduce the compute and bandwidth requirements of the seeder.
- Custom BitTorrent Clients: Open-source Social Media BitTorrent clients would display the most popular social media content by day, week, month, or year. These clients would allow users to seed only the content they find valuable thus organically moderating the network of ideas. Relevant content continues to be seeded and shared, while outdated or unpopular content fades due to a lack of seeds.
This setup seems like it could address key issues in traditional social media—privacy, censorship, and centralized control—while naturally prioritizing high-value content.
Why hasn’t a system like this been widely adopted? Is it a matter of technical limitations, lack of a viable economic model, or something else?
I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Torrents are made for static, unchanging data. They would not make a good basis for any communication platform, where mutability is necessary.
Also individual, tiny-torrents don’t scale up that well. Its an impressive torrent client that can handle more than a few thousand torrents. That’s about a single days worth of lemmy comments.
Reliance on domain names, database performance, storage, and probably a few other things are the main reasons why we can’t scale a typical fediverse server (like lemmy or mastodon), and have it run on a smartphone.
Great points! Although in a truly decentralized system, users wouldn’t need to seed everything—only the posts or comments they upvote. This would give upvotes more weight, as users would be actively supporting and “hosting” content with their compute resources.
No mutability required. Unpopular posts and comments fade when the OP (seeder) goes offline.
Honestly sounds like a disaster, what stops someone from controlling information by aggressively seed-boxing their chosen agenda?
No probs. I do some torrent projects in my spare time, and torrents are wonderful for what they’ve done: which is solving the static data distribution problem. But they have limited uses outside that. A social network very much needs mutability, and a message based framework. All the items are not static, scores, votes, users, posts, communities, comments, messages, a feed… all these are changing items.