- cross-posted to:
- fediverse@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- fediverse@lemmy.world
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If you are looking for a YouTube alternative you have peertub. I suspect you are looking for a Plex alternative? That would be jellyfin. It’s not federated, but it’s FOSS.
People often conflate FOSS and Fediverse. Please correct me if I am wrong.
I believe this article is asking for a centralized media server for his multiple Fediverse deployments.
Say I post an image here on Lemmy, then jump on to Mastodon to toot it out to whatever followers I have there. So that exact same image is stored twice.
I believe the ask is to build a system to store and deduplicate media posted across instances.
Isn’t this what IPFS is perfect for? Long term distributed storage?
Can someone explain what this is for? I’m basically unfamiliar with the non Lemmy parts of the fediverse. I had thought Mastodon was like Twitter so I don’t understand what a federated media server is supposed to do. It just sounds destined to turn into free pr0n hosting and then get shut down. But who knows.
Mastodon is a Fediverse platform. Lemmy is too. Anyone can host their own Mastodon and Lemmy instances.
When a user uploads an image or video on Mastodon instance 1, and a user of Mastodon instance 2 is following them, that image or video is copied over to Mastodon instance 2 - because that’s where that user resides.
This means content gets replicated and duplicated across every shared-network instance. Resulting in resilience, but also exponential, excessive storage needs.
OP is suggesting that media files should be shared across platform instances so that they don’t get duplicated many times. This would significantly reduce storage and bandwidth needs and use for the platform instances themselves, offloading and centralizing media file concerns.
When a user uploads an image or video on Mastodon instance 1, and a user of Mastodon instance 2 is following them, that image or video is copied over to Mastodon instance 2 - because that’s where that user resides.
The same thing happens with text posts, right? I don’t see an exponential expansion, just linear in the number of nodes. It sounds like the decentralized way to do things. Hmm. Anyway, thanks for the explanation. It saves some storage but doesn’t save bandwidth, it sounds like. Rather, the bandwidth requirement gets concentrated at the shared server.
Depends on the implementation. OP talked about potential of a CDN serving the shared resources. The instance servers wouldn’t have to proxy the content. Which would allow caching and not duplicating content and transmission through multiple endpoints.
Yeah, I guess it’s linear rather than exponential in growth. From an instance hoster point of view, it just never ends though, and not very predictable.
Something tells me there would be agreements between the instance provider and a media hosting provider and as such the media hosting provider would probably have some disclaimers about what they’re willing to host (war porn, regular porn, what have you). The two host providers would have to make sure everything they want to provide and everything they don’t want to host agree. I mean, there’s already lemmynsfw, so free porn hosting is already happening.
I honestly think the whole media hosting aspect of federation is dangerously flawed as long as instance hosts are still paying for storage and bandwidth, and I’m not sure how to fix it. It will cripple small instances with popular media if they host directly, but not hosting directly has a possibly lesser impact on all instance providers, with a higher aggregate impact. Tough choice. I don’t know enough about CDNs to say if that can solve the problem, depending on how media is federated.
This is going to need to be resolved if federation is going to grow to the next level. I hope someone finds an answer that works well enough for everybody, even the porn users and providers.
CDN’s are quite expensive compared to budget VPS and e.g. Hetzner storage cloud. Their basic purpose is to give quick delivery to regions far from the server, not really to save cost. I don’t know the story with lemmynsfw. It’s basically an onlyfans marketing platform right? Maybe they have some donation scheme in place behind the scenes. Anyway free porn hosting isn’t so much an issue per se (imgur, tumblr, etc are also that,) but for those who don’t want to host porn, it likely creates nonstop workload to clean it up.
Also, besides porn, it’s sad that this beautiful fediverse that might have become an alternative place for actual humans to interact, turns into another marketing space for corporate media. I’d like to put up a text only server. I don’t know if that’s really doable with current fediverse types. But why try to recreate reddit and imgur and maybe youtube? Those all already exist.