this post was submitted on 06 Nov 2023
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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.

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[–] [email protected] 49 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (4 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year 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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Distributed but high trust.

Zero-trust blockchain tech has no value. There is no such thing as a zero trust system in real life.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Not in an meaningful sense connected to the technology at all

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year 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.)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I didn't see any hype arount bittorrent.