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.
Personally I’m in the camp that I want history to be lost. That’s part of the appeal to me. In fact my favorite feature in the fedi is Mastodon’s option to enable auto-deleting posts of a certain age.
Only content that is explicitly pinned or reaches a certain amount of interactions should be saved imo. Since that’s the stuff you’d actually want to preserve rather than the 99% of forgettable content, and it would also drastically cut down on file hosting.
Another thing is that a federation should only act as the exchange between users on ActivityPub. It should only cache relevant information and not be expected to store everything, like I wrote before. The user should be a portable account that is stored on a device. The federation server would sync your account between your devices, but not store it. You send your content to the federation, and then the federation sends it out into the world where they choose to do what they want with it. The federation shouldn’t hoard it indefinitely.
Also this makes sense from a privacy perspective. If you care about privacy, why would you also want all your data indefinitely stored? Unless certain things are relevant and explicitly kept, it should be expected to expire and be lost by default. Where did we get this expectation that data should be stored forever? Also you expect it to be stored forever and not be trained on by AI?
This comment for example, after about a week or two most of the visibility and interaction of it will drop to zero. At that point, this comment should expire and no longer exist. I wrote this comment, it reached some people, and served it’s purpose and should expire. I’m not going to pretend like this comment is some kind of historic document that should be indefinitely preserved, nor do I expect or want it to be.
This comment for example, after about a week or two most of the visibility and interaction of it will drop to zero. At that point, this comment should expire and no longer exist.
That’s an incredible naive and egoistic take. Think about all the knowledge that is getting lost by applying this approach. How many times have you searched for some obscure thing and found the answer only on some five years old reddit post? That information would be lost for ever if you had your way.
Can you judge a work of art by it’s virality? Should you judge by virality?
A lot of times in history artists got recognition they deserved only after their death. When they ware alive they lived in poverty struggling to make ends meet.
There is a lot of internet 1.0 preserved by internet archive that I didn’t get to experience. There are flash games that I would love to preserve and show the next generation.
We wouldn’t have known how Scotts Cawthon games have looked like before he made FNAF if not for the preservation efforts.
Usually those artist did get some recognition during their life, but never got into the main stream. That changed due to the main stream changing and the people who did like the art showing it again. That is actually rather easy to do with something like the Fediverse. It just requires a download option. Especially when everybody is aware, that the content will be deleted, that would be a decent option.
Also a lot of content on social media in general is very short term. Stuff like politcal discussions are fairly useless after a few months in most cases. So that can be deleted without much care and again, if somebody wants to preserve it, they easily can just download it.
am I the only one who would advocate for text only storage: no. This comment also gets my point? There should be text only lemmy instances which only save text and do not allow any kind of image posting or storage.
- text is less offensive to consume and moderate than evil images or video
- text is way more information dense and can be even compressed more! Truly the green biosphere friendly data format. I would be willing to save text only data of strangers on my hard-drive, but not images or video. Could even be valuable llm analysis training data.
Yes people could post base64 encoded images, but that is a larger technical barrier and can be detected. If image storage is really need, images should be heavily compressed (webp 90% quality loss), provided as links to external sites, and whenever possible svg / vector graphics should be preferred.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
