but is concerned about hosting fees for serving images to millions of people
People stopped caring about image bandwidth decades ago. Try wrangling a video-hosting problem, like PeerTube does.
so like not share the videos peertube style? just the art section of the site?
Can’t they just not allow anyone on their server? Like read-only while people talk about it from other servers?
Reading still requires distributing media
“Millions of people” if only…
Mastodon has a couple million ADUs
Are you sure about that? Joinmastodon indicates 819k MAU, would you have a source you can share ?
Looks like I’m out of date
Removed by mod
So we need better federated hosting…
I’d love to be able to “seed” the fediverse through p2p hosting of some sort. I’d set aside 1 TB of storage and 20 MB/s for that.
Yeah I’ve thought a tiny bit about this but it gets dodgy with things like csam.
How do we address some one uploading stuff that would get you arrested?
I would hav thought stuff like Lemmy would have configurations to eg.: not allow to upload images locally, only hotlink.
Anyway, an alternative is “zero knowledge” storage, where you don’t know what you are storing (hence, you can’t “choose” what to host or not host either). Another alternative is disjoint storage, where two different servers store different halves of a file (eg.: an Odd Bytes server and an Even Bytes server), but this means now it’s necessary to hit more servers to recover a file.
But the sensible thing to do IMO is to apply “common carrier” concept. The water distribution company is not, to my knowledge, held liable when something happens like you fill a bucket of water and share it with someone else.
The water distribution company is not, to my knowledge, held liable when something happens like you fill a bucket of water and share it with someone else.
No but they are liable if there is lead in the water, even if they don’t know it.
There’s gotta be some kind of limited liability for this kind of thing. I mean, banks wouldn’t be liable if someone put csam in a safe deposit box or (assuming they don’t x-ray packages) UPS shipping csam in a sealed package. I think there just needs to be reasonable safeguards against it but I don’t know if any of that is built into the software.
Generally, if you add contact info for law enforcement and copyright owners, you’re not liable for content hosted on your server, as long as you take appropriate action when notified.
What that action means differs. For some countries, that means “wipe the data without a trace and inform the police”. For others, you need to collect evidence and submit that to the police, or have the police access your server to collect their own evidence. In some jurisdictions, you’re allowed to verify that CSAM reports are factually correct and action needs to be taken, in others you’re obligated to trust the government and never ever look at those files.
You’re not going to jail over this, but it’s going to be really annoying to have to explain the Fediverse and how server-to-server communication means you don’t know what user uploaded the files to the police every couple of months.
Issue here is that what’s in a safe deposit box isn’t also being shared/distributed. It is locked away.
If, however, they made copies of the contents of a box and put it in other boxes … and it came out somebody used that for CSAM then there probably would be some kind of liability.
Besides CSAM there’s also copyrighted material, etc which section 230 kind of covers but even then gets tricky since there’s a duty to respond to DMCA takedowns in order to get safe harbor protections.
It’d be a little more like someone going to a Kinko’s (or whatever like that exists anymore) and using their copiers to copy CSAM.
Exactly. And in such a scenario it becomes an issue for Kinkos
Probably arrange it such that not one person/server knows what the stored bytes are. There can be a server where the bytes/blocks get reconstructed where one can check for the bad stuff.
That doesn’t solve the cost problem. Now all the traffic is going through that intermediate server, and someone has to pay for that.
The had moved on to legal liability for csam, not hosting costs
I’m not sure if that makes it better. “I’m sorry officer, I have set up this elaborate cryptographic system to make sure I can’t see the files I host on my website” probably doesn’t violate any laws, but you’d better learn the phone number of a lawyer before you set it up.
Standard encrypted-at-rest data is probably a better solution. You probably don’t want to go look for illegal content until you’ve read up on the laws of the country you’re hosting in and your own so you know what to do, and what is or isn’t illegal.
Maybe nobody keeps a complete file? That way no one machine can keep a complete copy of anything let alone access it if it was stored in a single chunk of storage cryptographically? There’s already so much risk for hosts here not sure there’s a way to be safer without invasive technologies.
It’s unfortunate that it’s so slow, but IPFS would make a lot of sense for Fediverse content, assuming servers would also become IPFS nodes and bother to pin content posted in their servers.
Unfortunately, very few apps implement the protocol, even fewer implement it efficiently, and it can take seconds per file to resolve new content. On the upside, you’d get a peertube-like system that’d take care of Fediverse hosting with relative ease of development.
The cryptocurrency bros managed to get IPFS working for them, maybe we should give it a shot too.
Various services have the capability to fetch and copy hosted content (Mastodon, Lemmy, many more) but that capability is often restricted for larger files because those free servers don’t want to pay the massive bill for hosting video. I bet it’s also why Bluesky only recently added video support.
The problem isn’t necessarily the federated hosting, but picking who pays the bill. Everyone wants to host fancy text messages, but nobody wants to pay for large files.
That makes total sense. And I would guess decentralized hosting or federated hosting couldn’t meet this need?
It probably would, but if you federate hosting, you’ll need to agree on things like “what file size is acceptable” and “who pays when a scraper fetches terabytes of data in a day”.
Even with something like torrents or IPFS, someone needs to sacrifice storage and bandwidth to keep every file around. I don’t know of any good federated hosting solutions that would provide an experience acceptable to someone scrolling through a feed. The closest I can think of is one of those web3 scams, but that’d add the difficulty of variable storage costs (and inviting cryptocurrency traders).
hasnt this already been solved with cdns? even if you just use it for the image hosting.
Those cost money too
shit costs money. cant imagine wanting to stand up a server/instance/whatevs with no hosting costs.
Not no hosting cost, but cost for things you don’t want or need. I would host a server if it only filled up with things on my direct server and not pulling images and posts from other servers
Hell Yeah, Newgrounds is blocked in my country. But if they added Activity Pub it will solve the problem for me.
What country blocks new grounds of all things?
India
It would just federate comments I think, you’d still need to go to the site for the media
I missing the hamsters and dancing Jesus.
TIL Newgrounds still exists.
Not only does it still exist, newgrounds is unique in that it is a long-running website from the early days that is still being run by the same person (never bought out or sold), still has no ads (despite funding issues), still has the same basic focus, still hosting the same content, and is still more or less exactly the same despite some UI changes.
Granted part of that is there hasn’t been an real pressure on it, but still.
Genuinely, it is the kind of thing that I would want to put behind glass, because it is an abnormality in this wasteland we call the internet. It’s this beautiful little corner that has been allowed to remain as it is, unmolested by the terrible bullshit around it.
It’s feels like it’s the only site where the algorithm doesn’t kill animators.
Shit, am I about to become a newgrounds user again after like 15 years?
I assume the success of Friday Night Funkin’ gave it some extra life.
There’s also a lot of porn
Friday Night Fuckin’ as well, then
Not to mention that fediverse software still loves to occasionally hug of death a server when you post links, heh.
(Post federates to lots of servers, and lots of servers pull images/previews all at more or less once.)
Quick, someone post “Cascade” from Homestuck and bring down the entire fediverse.
Perhaps for images they’d have to federate just the text and a small thumbnail, and then just the people interested would click through. I wonder if that’d be enough.
TIL the flash animation I made in 2004 is still available on Newgrounds.
Newgrounds is dead serious about preserving its content, even with the death of Flash. Ruffle, the Flash emulator, was created by a former employee and Newgrounds is a major sponsor of the project. The most important movies have been converted to video as well.
When Newgrounds adopted high-resolution thumbnails about a decade and a half ago, there was a big volunteer campaign to recreate thumbnails for the entire back catalogue of the portal.
Thanks to Ruffle, people can and are still submitting Flash content to the portal, in addition to web-friendly content!
Talk about nostalgia fuel lol
User name checks out
Bring it to !usernamechecksout@lemmy.zip
Oh my god. I can’t get the song out of my head now! Sweet Jesus what have you done to me?!
Love it lol. That banana phone song was a blast from the past.
fuck I started leaning to program in flash specifically because of videos like this.
Actionscript 2 was the shit
Flash for Dummies was my first book on programing. I used it to make games about feces.
yo, this is straight fire
I’m pretty sure you’re the most famous person to use Lemmy. Well besides Margot Robbie
31k views on Newgrounds. I’m basically the Taylor Swift of Lemmy.
The cellular-bananular phone changed my life. I still sing it to this day
Interactivodular?
Omg mine too (too embarrassing to share).
I forgot how much more patient with pacing we all used to be back in the 00s. Just trusting that the video would go somewhere and there’d be a payoff.
Looking at some of the popular videos from back then, people these days would just scroll away because nothing hooked their attention quickly enough. Myself included. We’ve been trained to expect such quick payoff 😭.
Fuck, now I’ma have to go check on my old deviantart account.
I’d donate a few dollars a month. Newgrounds is a great content creation space. I still play games there from time to time. The Mario 63 game is off the wall. Dead Estate is also a fantastic retro style shooter like the ones I remember from my childhood. I think places like this need to survive.
The Problems of Tomorrow, Today!
Oh man, I miss that shit so much heh heh
Newgrounds would be awesome in the Fediverse tbh, would bring so much content (beyond politics and news).
Image hosting seems to be super problematic with activity pub, especially with something pf Newgrounds’ size. I’m super invested in this, can’t wait to see where it’ll go.
With Tumblr joining ActivityPub soon enough™ we’re already going to see the impact on hosting stuff like that. If I were Newgrounds, I’d wait for Tumblr to switch over and see how they do it.
Omg that would ne peak 🥹
