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The Fediverse Desperately Needs Sustainable File Hosting (evergreenfiles.com)

submitted 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) by sosodev@lemmy.world to c/fediverse@lemmy.world

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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.

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[-] tofuwabohu@slrpnk.net 6 points 2 days ago

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

[-] sosodev@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

The files are uploaded to two separate S3 buckets. One is backed by Wasabi and the other is Backblaze. So if one fails, randomly bans my account, etc then I can switch the primary to the other and setup another mirror afterwards.

Compute is hosted by fly.io and the CDN is bunny.net

[-] fishcharlie@eventfrontier.com 5 points 2 days ago

I know I'm not necessarily the target audience for this. But it feels too expensive. 6x the price of Cloudflare R2, almost 13x the price of Wasabi. Even iCloud storage is $0.99 for 50 GB with a 5 GB free tier. But again, I know I'm not necessarily the target audience as I have a lot of technical skills that maybe average users don't have.

If you ever get around to building an API, and are interested in partnerships, let me know. Maybe there is a possibility for integration into !echo@eventfrontier.com 😉.

[-] sosodev@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago

Yeah, I wish it could be cheaper but I’m not a corporation. Instead I’m dependent on them to make a simpler product.

The target audience is certainly not developers because they can jump through the hoops to setup their own S3 + CDN or similar.

[-] Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world 5 points 2 days ago

What is stopping some big giant, let's say Yahoo/Verizon from buying a shitload of storage, starting their own private instance which is open to the public, but private in the sense that only Verizon employees are admins and mods. Only Verizon controls things. Then advertise to the point that the average person on the street knows that Verizon.Lemmy exists, and assosiates Lemmy with being a Verizon thing? What is stopping big tech from pouring the money required for this concept to take off, and using their control over their instance from making the decentralized a centralized service in the general public's minds?

Right now Lemmy is 60k people. Ok. What if Lemmy was 200 million people, and only 60k knew it was a decentralized service? Everyone else just thought Verizon owned Lemmy?

[-] themoonisacheese@sh.itjust.works 2 points 2 days ago

This is literally exactly what happened to email. It didn't go great

[-] smeg@feddit.uk 1 points 2 days ago

Either they federate and all their users are exposed to the rest of the fediverse, or they don't and they may as well be a separate thing

[-] Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago

Yeah. What I'm saying is, they federate, but people have no idea what "federate" means. So they'd come here, and see "@smeg@feddit.uk" and not understand what feddit.uk was.

They would see you, and think you are a user of the verizon owned service. Not question it one bit, and just move on thinking it's all verizon.

The same way people in Atlanta will say "I want a coke" "What kind of coke?" "Root Beer".

Or the same way parents in the 90s would say "I bought you a Nintendo Game!" then you open it, and it's a Sega Saturn disc, when you have Sony Playstation. It's all just a Nintendo to them.

I'm saying if Verizon grew Lemmy to 200 million users, and all except 60k were on the Verizon instance, then despite being incorrect, Lemmy becomes "The Verizon owned Facebook".

Doesn't matter that it's federated.

[-] smeg@feddit.uk 1 points 2 days ago

I guess that's what instances are trying to avoid by preemptively blocking Threads. If everyone else blocks it then Lemmy carries on existing as it is. And I can't imagine big corpo wouldn't want to create their own name.

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[-] Boozilla@lemmy.world 3 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Thank you for writing this. Small typo: focued (focused).

[-] sosodev@lemmy.world 3 points 2 days ago

Thanks for reading and pointing out that typo! (I fixed it)

[-] muntedcrocodile@lemm.ee 2 points 2 days ago

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.

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