I think federated networks are the present
this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2023
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Asklemmy
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The problem with peer to peer is that it would require you to have stuff saved on your device and my sister can’t even keep her phone “empty enough” with 256GB so I think local “hubs” is the better right now.
Isn’t it essentially similar to the dark net that has been going like that successfully since forever ?
With distributed hash tables it is manageable. You do something like "store three copies on three peers" and as long as one of them is online the post is accessible. This is actually better than the way lemmy does it now. In principle each lemmy server stores the posts from its communities, and a copy of each post from communities its users are subscribed to. But since all instances are federated so well, in practice each of the 1000 lemmy instances stores a copy of almost every post ever made. That's like 100GB x1000. With a DHT, the amount of space used on each user's device is on average the amount of posts one user makes x3, no more.
Yeah I have serious concerns about how it will scale.
Luckily storage is the cheapest thing generally.
Maybe down the line they can start using varying degrees of cold storage for older content. Cheaper to store but more expansive to access.
Storage is cheap but most of the instance operators that are setting up right now aren't prepared for how much storage they're going to need and it's associate costs. I'm not talking the big boys like .World, but the hundreds of private and semi-private instances being set up on $12/mo VPS and such.
After 30 days of running my single user instance I'm at 23GB of storage. Since I'm using on prem equipment I have the lowest cost per GB possible and am not the least concerned. We're going to see a ton of attrition with hosted instances as the costs of ownership goes from 10, to 20, to 40, to $50+/mo. due to storage. Many aren't in anyway prepared to tackle the topic of moving PICTRS off to object storage or engage in other mitigations.
I'm not worried. Text is tiny to store and any image posted remains on the source instance and is not duplicated, just linked.
We could also just delete stuff after some time. Nobody really needs the 1000th repost of a meme from 20 years ago.
If they’re storing it right, it is content addressed, meaning that their servers are aware of duplicates because each file is hashed.
Look at the Zerotier vpn model. They have several instances hosted all over the world that the client app running on user devices initially contact. These instances are in essence federated even if they use a different term for it.
The instance then gives each client a list of peers and how to reach them, and the clients attempt to reach each other directly, bypassing the instance where possible.
Both models work together. There's no need for locking into one and ignoring the other. Use the best tool for the job at hand.
P2P social networks have a moderation problem. Individual users are all their own moderators, which works like the "block" feature on Lemmy and KBin. However, this can get super exhausting so fast. There's only so much fascist, homophobic, or transphobic bullshit a person can tolerate in an online interaction before they just give up and leave the network because it feels like there's nothing worthwhile there.
There may be a solution to this problem someday, but for now, you have a choice for P2P networks. You can give up on user discovery entirely, as in Secure Scuttlebutt, where your network grows as you get invited to follow people or invite people to follow you. Alternatively, you can give up on moderation entirely, as with Nostr. I think either are fatally flawed presently, making federated services the best choice for having good control over your social networking experience without having to do every single part of it yourself.
this can get super exhausting so fast
I wish to see a P2P network with moderation "subscriptions"! So you can subscribe to the "anti-spam list" or "!asklemmy moderation list by @mekhos" or "anti-xenophobic list". The integrity of each filter list is upheld by its reputation. If a spam list flags too many legitimate users, people have the choice to abandon it. If users of a community (which is just a hashtag) don't like the direction the mods are steering it, they can resubscribe to a different set of mods.
I think ultimately something like that will be the solution. And maybe it will just be that you can subscribe to any other user's block list, and perhaps they can in turn subscribe to yours, and basically within your peer 2 peer network the block list(s) are federated. You could potentially even have a block and whitelist where when someone you think shouldn't get blocked gets blocked you personally white list them, and in the case of conflicting block and whitelists, a consensus based confidence list is created where some users just don't show in your feed if enough percentage of your block list follows block them vs whitelist them, and users near 50% show in your feed in a collapsed "controversial" mode
Bluesky does this.
The atProtocol has some pretty cool things. I hope ActivityPub can adopt the ability for users to invite others so closed instances can have an invite system
Federation for big communities, p2p for friend and misc local affinity groups.
I just wish more people knew about Manyverse, especially activist circles
All three in combination will be the future
agree, this is not a "hit 2 birds with 1 stone" situation
In my opinion federation is the better peer to peer / decentralized service. Power is not centralized, but everything can be run as efficiently as a centralized service.
Pure P2P doesn't scale well, especially for content which is generated by a few, and watched by many.
BitTorrent didn't get the memo apparently.
There are plenty of dead torrents with no seeders. What happens when the post you want to see has no seeders? Most people don’t keep their device on 24/7 and how many people access on a mobile device whose OS doesn’t support this kind of access?
This is a diametrically opposite problem from what the parent comment was talking about. They were saying that P2P is bad at sharing new popular content from one user to many, which is patently false. You are worried about old content that hasn't been accessed in years and decades disappearing. This is a real question to think about.
Right now reddit and twitter bear the burden of maintaining access to entirety of old content. Reddit even has a system to "archive" posts older than 6 months to make storing them on server easier. In a decentralized network, no one user has that responsibility. What can be done about it? Maybe we need to reconsider our idea of "permanence", tone down our expectations that all content will be accessible forever, even if no one accesses it. Maybe a censorship-free P2P network would need some sort of sunset system anyway, because otherwise it will fill up with useless spam (the same way Usenet was made useless because it became 1% posts and 99% binaries). Maybe data hoarder enthusiasts will run archive nodes with much larger storage dedicated to preserving old post history. Maybe you can add a filecoin-like system to your P2P network, where you pay $0.01 to guarantee that your comment remains online for 10 years, $0.02 for 20 years, etc. Not recommending it, just saying there are options.
Do note that neither reddit nor lemmy are immune to such bitrot. If reddit goes bankrupt and shuts down servers tomorrow, all that content will be gone as well. Maybe archive.org will manage to save a snapshot, maybe pushshift.io will have a backcopy, but what about all the posts made since pushshift API access was revoked? They'd be gone. As lemmy instances go in and out of existence over the years, what happens if this instance and the ones that got a federated copy of this post all go offline? This post will be gone from history as well. Its continued existence can only be guaranteed if users on the new instances years in the future go back and view it here again before it disappears.
I think centralized will be dominant. Centralized systems get the best efficiency which gives a better return to capitalists.
I don’t understand the concept of peer to peer in this scenario. Isn’t lemmy essentially peer to peer?
No, each user is a “peer”, in Lemmy they access content through the instances.
They are talking something more like IPFS.
I don’t really know much about IPFS, but I think a downside to peer to peer is the potential for content to disappear because someone turns off their computer or quits whatever application. I can’t be the only person to have a torrent stall at 80% because the rest isn’t available in the network.
Bit torrenting is an example of peer to peer. Blockchain theoretically works this way too.
I think this article by Alyssa Rosenzweig is important to consider. I think it does make some assumptions about the purpose of federating, but it does make one very important point that I think everyone in this space is ignoring: the internet was already fundamentally federated from the beginning, and look how that turned out.
It's for this reason that I believe a fediverse only survives due to a culture of keeping it alive, but I don't know that that culture will survive long term in a free market. It might be that the internet is just like the rest of the world: an ebb and flow of democratic and totalitarian states, history being forgotten, lessons being relearned the hard way. That might just be how the internet works now.
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