Most of the problems in the current internet landscape is caused by the cost of centralized servers. What problems are stopping us from running the fediverse on a peer to peer torrent based network? I would assume latency, but couldn't that be solved by larger pre caching in clients? Of course interaction and authentication should be handled centrally, but media sharing which is the largest strain on servers could be eased by clients sending media between each other. What am I missing? Torrenting seems to be such an elegant solution.

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[–] cogman@lemmy.world 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

AFAIK, the main bottleneck is data storage. Related to processing power, but also IO and having a central source of truth.

[–] themoonisacheese@sh.itjust.works 2 points 10 months ago

Sure, but data storage is quite cheap these days. I'm not saying it isn't a problem, but a 12 Tb raid goes a really long way, or AWS s3 charges pennies per GB per month and solves all your problems if you're prepared to spend tens of dollars per month.

Bandwidth on the other hand is either inaccessible (read: you have a normie ISP that has at most 2 speeds to sell you and neither of them have guarantees), or extremely expensive, on the order of thousands per month. On top of that, if you happen to pay AWS for storage, each request must be forwarded to AWS, converted in some way by your server then sent to the client, which means it eats both up and down bandwidth. Of course, if you know what you're doing you can use Amazon's CDN but at this point administering your instance is a full time job and your expenses are that of small company.