The fediverse's decentralized nature poses a vexing file hosting conundrum - how can we sustainably support the community's voracious appetite for shared media?

Disclaimer: I wrote this article and made this website.

There was some talk of this issue in the recent fediverse inefficiencies thread. I’m hopeful that in the future we’ll have a decentralized solution for file hosting but for now I deeply believe that users should pay for their own file hosting.

  • glowing_hans@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    0·
    6 days ago

    am I the only one who would advocate for text only storage: no. This comment also gets my point? There should be text only lemmy instances which only save text and do not allow any kind of image posting or storage.

    • text is less offensive to consume and moderate than evil images or video
    • text is way more information dense and can be even compressed more! Truly the green biosphere friendly data format. I would be willing to save text only data of strangers on my hard-drive, but not images or video. Could even be valuable llm analysis training data.

    Yes people could post base64 encoded images, but that is a larger technical barrier and can be detected. If image storage is really need, images should be heavily compressed (webp 90% quality loss), provided as links to external sites, and whenever possible svg / vector graphics should be preferred.