This will take place ~24 hours from now. Feel free to post and upvote questions beforehand in this post, as it will turn into the AMA tomorrow.
This is a chance for any users, admins, or developers to ask anything they’d like to myself, @nutomic@lemmy.ml , @SleeplessOne1917@lemmy.ml , or @phiresky@lemmy.ml about Lemmy, its future, and wider issues about the social media landscape today.
Is there any new p2p/decentral technology that is trying to advance beyond federation?
It would be cool to have a generic framework to make web resources that are inherently decentralized without the need for sponsor and hosting.
Like IPFS but as a social site. Everyone helps partially host content in exchange for access to all the content.
There is a ton of decentralized projects that no one has really ever heard of, new ones pop up all the time (I was watching multiple of them in the past). Sadly in most cases it seems like most authors stop working on their projects after a while.
The same ideas have existed for a long time but both decade old projects (ever heard of Freenet? Probably no) and new ones . Many of them are very ambitious and try to replace huge swaths of things (not just file storage but also social aspects, web of trust, etc) but then collapse under the complexity. IPFS is the most well known new project and (good imo) has limited its scope, but sadly (still) suffers from huge scalability issues, some of which are deep in the design.
I think it’s really hard to align incentives there - the nicer it is the harder it is to make money with it. So either these projects tend towards control by one entity or they tend towards death.
Really the only one that seems to have a long lasting life so far is torrents. Which are amazing. And Email if you want to count that.
Torrents are truly one of the best inventions of the internet.
They’ve fully solved the static data distribution problem, in a way that’s resilient and practical. I do a few torrent-related side projects, and I’m also super-interested in how we could integrate them into lemmy UIs and apps in order to take on YouTube.
I’d love to see that happen.
There are different software that could help this happen but I’m not sure how they’d handle all of lemmy’s content
There is Gun.js and OrbitDB (OrbitDB runs on IPFS using Helia)
and there is FreeNet which allows hosting of freesites on their network if you have something downloaded to your computer.
Some of the problems could be mitigated by volunteers running relay nodes hosting the kind of content they want to stay up (this would work with Gun.js and OrbitDB since it allows subscribing to specific data) or just general relay nodes that gives the network more capacity (this would be the method if you are working with FreeNet)
Again not sure how easy or hard this would be so I hope the developers share their thoughts.
Edit: When I say relay nodes hosting I don’t mean they have control over the data but instead keeps the data online. The data is still stored on the users own device and is shared between users if both are online at the same time.