This is a question that comes to mind every time I spend a few days focusing on the fediverse. Normally I’m on the microblogging side, but now I have a Lemmy account it might start a proper discussion.

So, to the point, pretty much every fedi platform has similar problems with small servers taking a beating whenever a post goes viral. This ends up costing the server owner a bunch of money trying to keep their server alive while thousands of instances attempt to pull large static files from the original host’s post. This recently instigated this call to action on this forum.

I’ve never seen the question of torrents answered and it feels like a lot of effort and a bit self entitled to get the ear of fedi software devs to implement torrents as a solution, so I’m putting this here.

If media files were made into torrents when a post was being created, an extra object could be added to post objects like

'torrentcdn': {
  'https://imagePathAsKey.jpg': {
    'infohash': 'ba618eab...',
    'torrentLocation': 'https://directlinkto.torrent',
    'webseed': 'https://imagePathAsKey.jpg',
    ...
  }
}

This would not break compatibility as it would just be ignored by anything not looking for a ‘torrentcdn’ object, yet up to date instances could use this instead of directly pulling the static files.

This would benefit instances as when a post goes viral, the load would be distributed amongst all instances attempting to download the file.

This could also benefit clients and instances as larger files like short videos could be distributed using webtorrent, massively reducing the load on server when many people are watching the same video.

Thoughts?

    • manicdave@feddit.ukOP
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      5 months ago

      You could just have a standard peertube instance hidden away on the backend and use the peertube embed code to insert videos into your microblog and pretend the Peertube instance doesn’t exist.

      I’ve played with peertube a lot, and as long as your cross site permissions are set up correctly, you can access the player API from your host site.