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.

  • Bobby Turkalino@lemmy.yachts
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    8 months ago

    Torrenting requires way more resources than people realize. It’s easy to look at your torrents’ download speeds and think “oh, that’s less than a normal download, like from Steam, so it must not take nearly as many resources” – it’s not all about bandwidth. The amount of encryption and hashing involved in torrenting is fairly CPU heavy (every ~4 MB piece has to be hashed and verified), especially if your CPU doesn’t have onboard encryption hardware (think mobile devices). The sheer number of connections involved even in just one torrent can also bog down a network like you wouldn’t believe – anyone who runs a home seedbox can attest.

  • Dunstabzugshaubitze@feddit.de
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    8 months ago

    Most clients are web browsers and support for torrents in http is the same as for every other file.

    So that would only give us a use for torrents as a form of content distribution plattform to get the actual files closer to the client.

    In cases where we have actual non browser clients: i like to curate what i am distributing and don’t want to distribute anything i happen stumble upon or would you be willing to store and more importantly share everything you find on 4chan or that might show up in your mastodon feed?

  • taladar@sh.itjust.works
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    8 months ago

    Authentication and authorization can not be handled centrally if the host performing the actual action you want to apply those to can not be trusted.

    Media sharing is mainly a legal problem. With decentralized solutions you couldn’t easily delete illegal content and anyone hosting it would potentially be legally liable.

    • uis@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      and anyone hosting it would potentially be legally liable.

      Bullshit in many countries. Well, I know two of them: USA and Russia. First requires intention, second has explicitly excludes P2P from liability.