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.

  • @grueEnglish
    4•2 months ago

    Seems to me that this is a use-case Freenet Hyphanet would be good for, both because it distributes the problem of file storage load and because it eliminates responsibility for each host to police his node by making it impossible for anyone to know which file chunks said node is hosting.

    • @[email protected]English
      14•2 months ago

      Nothing solves the problem of CSAM quite like… making everyone partially culpable in the storage and distribution of CSAM.

      You can’t prove I was hosting child porn. Statistically, we all only had a 70% probability of having it on our computers

      • @grueEnglish
        5•2 months ago

        Stuff that isn’t accessed eventually gets deleted. If the Lemmy instances (which are clearnet, of course) delete the references to it, it would go away.

        • @[email protected]English
          8•2 months ago

          Which gets back to volunteers going through and moderating it. And the ethical and moral question of whether people who upload it are reported.

          And… honestly? if there is even a 20% chance that running a file sharing node (because I just love to give away both bandwidth and storage…) is being used to store CSAM? I ain’t doing that shit and most people will similarly run screaming and call the cops.