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.

  • cumEnglish
    2•1 month ago

    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.

    • @sosodevOPEnglish
      3•1 month ago

      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.