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.

We totally need sustainable file hosting. Freedom!

Wait... the fuck did you just upload? Oh god. Oh god no. Do I have to call the cops on you? Oh no. Wait, does this count as possession? FUCK!!!!!!

We need someone else to handle the totally sustainable file hosting. Freedom!

anyway to use torrent protocol somehow? Like popcorn time did?

Ok, hear me out.

We find the users with the slowest internet and start sending them all the data. They don’t have to keep anything on disk. Then they send it all back and forth between each other. Any time a user makes a request, we just wait for one of the slow nodes to come across the data and send it out.

We use the slowest wires for all the storage. It’s fool proof.

IPFS?

Too wet for server racks in the forest.

Have you considered providing something like this: https://jortage.com/ and maybe contribute to their efforts to develop a specific API for that? Source code is here: https://github.com/jortage

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.

You're not the first to think about this.

See https://aumetra.xyz/posts/the-fedi-ddos-problem - there an embed server is proposed, to be shared by multiple instances (ideally a great many would use just the one), which can host things like image files and previews.

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 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.

Is a p2p system for media with the instances just hosting magnet links too slow for fediverse purposes? To me this seems like the most resilient way to handle media in a decentralized system

I think Tenfingers could be an interesting option as hosters do not know what they host, the data can be modified, and it's 100% decentralised.

I wish there was some version of PBS for Lemmy, like public funds for hosting. I'll admit I haven't really thought this through, so there's probably some problems with my idea.

I think IPFS could help the fediverse with storage.

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