There’s an issue with torrents, only the most popular ones get replicated and the process is manual\social.
Something like Freenet is needed, which automatically “spreads” data over machines contributing storage, but Freenet is an unreliable storage, basically like a cache where older and unwanted stuff gets erased.
So it should be something like Freenet, but possibly with some “clusters” or “communities” with a central (cryptography-enabled) authority of each being able to determine the state of some collection of data as a whole, and pick priorities. My layman’s understanding is that this would be similar to something between Freenet and Ceph, LOL. More like a cluster filesystem spread over many nodes, not like cache.
You have more knowledge on this than I did. I enjoyed reading about Freenet and Ceph. I have dealt with cloud stuff, but not as much on a technical-underpinnings level. My first freenet impression from reading some articles gives me 90s internet vibes based on the common use cases they listed.
I remember ceph because I ended up building it from the AUR once on my weak little personal laptop because it got dropped from some repository or whatever but was still flagged to stay installed. I could have saved myself an hours long build if I had read the release notes.