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.
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?
Isnt this the exact reason why there was such concern over the idea of Threads federating with the fediverse at large?
This is literally exactly what happened to email. It didn’t go great
Either they federate and all their users are exposed to the rest of the fediverse, or they don’t and they may as well be a separate thing
Yeah. What I’m saying is, they federate, but people have no idea what “federate” means. So they’d come here, and see “@smeg@feddit.uk” and not understand what feddit.uk was.
They would see you, and think you are a user of the verizon owned service. Not question it one bit, and just move on thinking it’s all verizon.
The same way people in Atlanta will say “I want a coke” “What kind of coke?” “Root Beer”.
Or the same way parents in the 90s would say “I bought you a Nintendo Game!” then you open it, and it’s a Sega Saturn disc, when you have Sony Playstation. It’s all just a Nintendo to them.
I’m saying if Verizon grew Lemmy to 200 million users, and all except 60k were on the Verizon instance, then despite being incorrect, Lemmy becomes “The Verizon owned Facebook”.
Doesn’t matter that it’s federated.
I guess that’s what instances are trying to avoid by preemptively blocking Threads. If everyone else blocks it then Lemmy carries on existing as it is. And I can’t imagine big corpo wouldn’t want to create their own name.
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.
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.
A lot of pictures and memes get posted here. And every other post shows a thumbnail picture. These images are all files.
Not denying that. But maybe we should accept that photos and memes and whatnot aren’t that valuable and limit their size or the volume allowed per user. Just a thought.
limit their size or the volume allowed per user
Fedi software like Misskey already did exactly that. Each user have limited “drive” which can be upgraded/customized per user. People even reuse image they already have on their drive, so it won’t be any duplicate files.
Yeah, I wonder if that would fly with the users. I just scrolled through my timeline and nearly every post has some colorful image to it. (except in Ask Lemmy and No Stupid Questions.) I’m not sure if users would accept this platform if it were mostly textual. And putting restrictions in place would certainly reduce the number of images. Scrolling through Lemmy would feel like Hackernews, not any modern social media platform. I doubt mainstream people appreciate that.
But yeah, that’d be possible. We could just close the meme communities for example. Or exclude them from individual instances to save some space there.
Reddit is basically entirely image or video posts, all hosted by reddit directly.
People forget why Imgur was created
You’re not the first to think about this.
See https://aumetra.xyz/posts/the-fedi-ddos-problem - there an embed server is proposed, to be shared by multiple instances (ideally a great many would use just the one), which can host things like image files and previews.
There’s a big issue with this.
If malicious content like CP gets uploaded on to a server, obviously other servers do not want this to be replicated to their servers. So how would you solve this problem? Well they could give all moderation power to the original server they’re replicating, but that could be far too slow or they could even miss malicious content like this. Or maybe they even disagree about taking down certain things.
Another solution is that any server participating in the content mirroring could take it down for just themselves or for all the other members as well. The issue here is now you’re expanding moderation abilities, while also giving the other servers much more responsibilities.
It’s not as simple as wanting to replicate content. If you host it, you are responsible for any illegal content a user may upload to it. Not to mention laws vary by country as well. Ignoring the technical challenges here, it’s also mandatory that the other servers replicate the other servers data to also choose to be responsible for what gets uploaded. And that is a really big ask. The law doesn’t care about the technical reasons, they’ll just see illegal content uploaded to your server.
This issue already exists, regardless of the embed server problem. Right now, images posted by users to an instance get sent to that community’s instance and then copied to all instances of all subscribers.
If anything, the embed server provides a potential solution - rather than federate the image directly, simply link to the copy of the image on the embed server. (I’ve done some customized code changes on top of pyfedi to implement this idea there.)
I imagine instance admins would still want to to monitor and delete links to CP, but under this idea only the admins of the embed server and their delegates would have the ability to remove CP from the embed server itself. (Should they delegate this ability to other instance admins? Probably only on a case-by-case basis at most.)
Perhaps they could support a reporting functioning from mods and instance admins though…
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).
p2p from behind a CGNAT works just fine as long as a single server is accessible and can mediate connections between other peers. Most non-servers are behind some sort of NAT these days.
Why?
Because that’s where all the users are. The “social” aspect of a “social” network. Anyone can host a forum but it’s useless without users.
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.
At least as far as US law is concerned, a federally hosted and administrated social media platform gets interesting with America’s unusually strong free speech laws, since there’s content which is legal but unethical which they likely would not be allowed to block or moderate, such as bullying, hate speech, misinformation, etc. but also illegal content would be immediately moderated away, which might include content that falls into legal grey areas or ethical but technically illegal content, like someone copy/pasting the contents of a paywalled article, or discussing any kind of DRM or digital security bypass
Honestly I think there’s good reason for governments to host a Mastodon instance for their representatives to use for communications, but inviting the public to use it might get weird for sure
Oh yeah, I totally agree with you that governments should at least host their own Mastodon instances. I thought it was weird when Twitter became the go to for communication from the US Government.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
as I stated in this comment it’s not really feasible as to ~5s delay that was tested some time ago.
That’s the wrong comment.
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
Ha! That’s awesome!
I was brushing my teeth when reading this comment and inadvertently ended up swallowing all my toothpaste.
don’t forget to spit
You jest but… delay line memory
This is amazing and I love it.
Top 5 YouTube videos this one
I know I’m not necessarily the target audience for this. But it feels too expensive. 6x the price of Cloudflare R2, almost 13x the price of Wasabi. Even iCloud storage is $0.99 for 50 GB with a 5 GB free tier. But again, I know I’m not necessarily the target audience as I have a lot of technical skills that maybe average users don’t have.
If you ever get around to building an API, and are interested in partnerships, let me know. Maybe there is a possibility for integration into !echo@eventfrontier.com 😉.
Yeah, I wish it could be cheaper but I’m not a corporation. Instead I’m dependent on them to make a simpler product.
The target audience is certainly not developers because they can jump through the hoops to setup their own S3 + CDN or similar.
I found this https://github.com/Marie673/Torrent_Proxy
Its in chinese so idk if its whats needed but if each instance also acted as a torrent proxy then thats decentralised domain agnostic file hosting that doesnt break frontends but also allows clients to update to do resource resolution themselves while helping to serve the fediverses files as a whole.
Too wet for server racks in the forest.
They grew there
Look I know there called “farms” but like I told the last forest gnome, the dank woods is no place to host data.
I think IPFS could help the fediverse with storage.
I expect something like this to end up being the solution, but I think we’re far from a consensus in that regard.
I think most architecture design decisions are made by the developers of the fediverse projects. If the 3 Lemmy devs or the Mastodon maintainers agreed to do it… (And it’s technically feasible.) I suppose it could be done.
I mean as long as it works seemlessly and doesn’t violate ActivityPub, we don’t really need a consensus of all the users and admins. We just need the server admins to install the next update.
To actually keep data persistent on IPFS and not be deleted by the garbage collector, you need to have a server(s) pin the node that holds that data.
You either host these servers yourself, or pay providers to store it for you.
And at that point you just reinvented a server simply hosting your data but with extra steps.
Thank you for pointing that out. I’m not familiar with IPFS but I tend to agree there’s no free lunch here. People think you can wave the blockchain wand and free computing appears but there’s always costs built in somewhere.
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
Thank you for writing this. Small typo: focued (focused).
Thanks for reading and pointing out that typo! (I fixed it)
