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.

  • Endorkend
    54•8 months ago

    Quite a few systems use torrent style distribution.

    Heck, even Windows uses a distributed bandwidth system where you can set it to download chunks of updates from local networked systems.

    All technologies, like bittorrent, nonSQL databases, blockchain, AI and the like become used as an invisible part of systems once the idiotic hype about the technology wanes.

    • TheOneCurlyEnglish
      17•8 months ago

      Except blockchain solves no useful problems so you will never find it behind anything that isn’t explicitly using it for marketing.

      • @CmdrShepardEnglish
        25•8 months ago

        But what if we used AI driven, cloud integrated blockchain to create a hybrid platform for your business needs?

      • @bort@feddit.de
        6•8 months ago

        https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/why-im-less-than-infinitely-hostile

        tldr: there are some legitimate use cases. But not in the first world. And they are unrelated to what crypt-bros are trying to sell.

        disclaimer 1: the javascript for the comments is really bad and may freeze your browser

        disclaimer 2: while the ideas in the article are interesting, they are flawed (or at least debatable). See comment-section for details.

      • Alex
        6•8 months ago

        Git is a distributed block chain, from a certain point of view.

      • JackbyDevEnglish
        3•8 months ago

        To me blockchain just means merkle trees. I know that’s not how everyone else defines it, I’m not trying to start a debate, but tools like git use that technology as well. (Not that Bitcoin invented them or anything.)