This is an opportunity for any users, server admins, or interested third parties to ask anything they’d like to @nutomic@lemmy.ml and I about Lemmy. This includes its development and future, as well as wider issues relevant to the social media landscape today.
Note: This will be the thread tmrw, so you can use this thread to ask and vote on questions beforehand.
This is interesting, I’ve never considered torrents for this exact case before. Has anyone done any groundwork to figure out what this would look like from a systems level? I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around the big picture - where the seeders come from, what are the incentives to keep certain kinds of data resilient, how to keep complexity away from the clients, etc.
The thing that came to my mind is to have all torrent links in some kind of blockchain, where new torrent links can be added all the time and if someone wants to help the community they can just download all the torrent links from the blockchain and help seeding the torrents. These can be images, videos, audios or whatever else. The problem hereby is it can get really big really fast. This could be prevented by adding size limits for specific file types and also removing torrents from the blockchain, which werent used by a user for a long time. Effectively we would have to add a counter for visits in the last 6months and also the last viewed date from a user for each torrent. That way old, not frequentely accessed data would be deleted and prevent the size to get too big.
This general approach would prevent data loss but also help decentralize data. Of course this is just a concept which just came to my mind but it should be possible to implement i think