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.
this post was submitted on 05 Nov 2024
389 points (99.7% liked)
Fediverse
28237 readers
297 users here now
A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).
If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to !moderators@lemmy.world!
Rules
- Posts must be on topic.
- Be respectful of others.
- Cite the sources used for graphs and other statistics.
- Follow the general Lemmy.world rules.
Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration), Search Lemmy
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
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 ๐.
Yeah, I wish it could be cheaper but Iโm not a corporation. Instead Iโm 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.
Interesting approach, good luck! Admittedly I'm not sure if many users want to take their media uploading in their own hands and pay for it but maybe I'm wrong. Where are the images stored? Do you have your own hardware? Backups etc?
Also since you're interested in Fediverse media storage, I recently read about https://jortage.com/ It's a third party storage for your instance with deduplication, pretty interesting idea. Takes away a bit of the federated part though
The files are uploaded to two separate S3 buckets. One is backed by Wasabi and the other is Backblaze. So if one fails, randomly bans my account, etc then I can switch the primary to the other and setup another mirror afterwards.
Compute is hosted by fly.io and the CDN is bunny.net
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
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.
load more comments
(1 replies)
I think IPFS could help the fediverse with storage.
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.
load more comments
(1 replies)
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.
Thank you for writing this. Small typo: focued (focused).
Thanks for reading and pointing out that typo! (I fixed it)
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.