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.
You’re basically talking about IPFS. I think their problem is that they gave it a local HTTP interface and the documentation is… in need of improvements.
I always shy away from newer tech because of lackluster documentation and poor leadership. The latter is rare enough. Without proper documentation, I feel like I have to read the code and make my own notes to put into their documentation platform. Which is not what I want to do when I use it. Contributing is nice, but when doing something a core member would do without credit, it will dissuade me from participating.
I know that feeling. Curiosity often gets the better of me though: I’m a
nix/ NixOS user - amongst the worst documented projects I’ve come across.