For personal use, no. There is no benefit.
For something like a home cluster, yes I would use something like Ceph to spread the data over several systems.
this post was submitted on 05 Oct 2025
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Decentralization
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What about backups? I mean for someone who hasn't (a paid) one already.
I mean, I don’t really have a use case for a remote file system my self currently, decentralized or otherwise. It’s an interesting idea though. I’m curious how that would even work.
I could imagine it being useful for some organization that has membership that fluctuates consistently. Precluding relying on anyone to manage or host a central file server. Or an organization that can’t rely on a central server staying up due to some adversarial relationship with another part.
Or something on a mesh network that pulls the movie you want into RAM from the nearest network node that has it.
It's not like it's sloppier than how android works.
If you want more info just ask away, but in a nutshell my system is based on reciprocal sharing (I share yours because you share mine), so as soon as there are a bunch of users, there will never be a shortage of storage space. Most other systems are based on benevolent users who donate space, but I feel it might not scale well.
Is it a matter of everyone having a copy of every file? Or is there some sort of limit, like, a certain amount of people connected having a copy being deemed enough to ensure that it will always be available?
You decide, so if you want a redundance of 10 for example, you'd share ten (similar sized) files and ten others will share your file.
I ran a couple decentralized filesystems 20+ years ago on FreeBSD. It was cool but I didn't find it was worth the headaches for my use cases as compared to spinning up a raid array and nfs exporting it.
Ah I see. So you had a local decentralised file system, am I understanding that correctly?
Sorry, I misinterpreted "decentralized" as "distributed"
No problem, they overlap quite the bit.
Yes, just on LAN. I'm having trouble recalling names. I think it was a project out of Cornell? No... CMU! It was "Coda"!
I’ve used ceph (very little) and longhorn for Kubernetes storage. I’ve never really looked into distributed filesystems but could see something with a longhorn or lower level of administrative complexity as something I would use. The replication and fault tolerance would be my primary interest. Some sort of network share on top of the distributed filesystem too, like windows DFS sort of?
Also, again, never looked into distributed filesystems much but if there was a mode where a distributed filesystem could replace syncthing for ensuring a copy of the data was replicated to specific/all machines, that would be interesting. Specifically I’d like to replicate my media share to my laptop so I have it when offline / traveling. I’m all on Linux these days but something like what windows has where you can make a network share available offline and it just caches it to a local directory…. Feels like a distributed FS could do something similar.
I think eventually many will be forced to organize, do business and socialize without using servers. It will involve decentralized file sharing.
So far there has not been a good reason fur many to use that strategy because there is no popular ecosystem and most use the far easier server modal.
But eventually, perhaps soon, there will be obstacles to hosting some types of sites and apps. Some legal, and some business reasons.
Then what you are doing will be more in need, so it’s good you are doing it
Thanks!
I do. It's in beta. It's called veilid. Check out veilid.org
Any info about how it works/what it is more in detail? The website only lists a couple of people and a donation page.
Yeah sorry about that I didn't do a good job there..
Hmm, so at a first glance it's IPFS with obfuscated routes plus there seems to be other possibilities, but for now it wants to be more of a framework for future applications?
Interesting, do you have any real world usage examples, like what do/can you use it for, and how do you use it?
Cheers
I'm so glad you asked!
Look up veilid chat in the Google play store...
And join the discord!
And if you like, I think the command to install a node is sudo apt update sudo apt install veilid-server veilid-cli
Very interesting!
Can't find a Veilid chat though, Veil chat maybe?
Discord, talking instead of writing 😅?! I'll try 😊
I applied for the beta ages ago, maybe it hasn't opened up again yet. Maybe it's full.
https://play.google.com/store/search?q=veilid+chat&c=apps
This may not work... Not sure how beta programs work in Google play.
Doesn't work, must be restricted I guess.
Is it working well?
It's okay. I've been working on maintaining the server more than testing the client.
It's really simple to set up if I understood correctly, is it maintenance heavy or is it just like you need to upgrade it sometimes?
So it is pretty simple to set up but not if you containerize it like I have I've decided to put it in a container because it's still beta and to do that you have to give it persistent storage and route the ports correctly and all that stuff and people do seem to have trouble with that.
Regardless, I wanted to do something to support the project and that seemed like a pretty good way to do it and it took some effort but not a whole lot and I learned a few things in the process so it was fun.
Definitely nice of you!
Yeah the port forwarding seems to be the tricky part for everyone.
sure but like not for everything. I use online for moving files mostly and photos actually because if I lost all my photos it would be sad but not like catastrophic and they take a lot of space compared to docs.
Would you use one online filesystem for that if the counterpart was to share some disk space (and bandwidth)?
oh yeah I could totally see it. I think the big issue is I don't keep my machine on and likely other people don't to which would be a problem to the whole system.
I figured that too, so my system overshares, you have 10 others sharing your data (or more or less, but you'd chip in more or less shared storage too) so that statistically the information is accessible close to all the time.
yeah but see making sure I have 10x as much space as I need. likely not going to do it then.
Yes it's not for storing large backups, more hundreds of gigas maybe, or stuff like git repos or a website
Thanks for the input!
Depending on how we are defining it, I have used several in my personal and professional lives. I dont see a compelling use case for me currently in my self-hosting setup.
you might find peergos interesting
I do!
Peergos is an open-source project
So it's Dropbox with FOSS and encryption if I understands it correctly, very neat!
The only drawback is it's centralised, but I will for sure check this out.