This is not how the fediverse works. Each server keeps a whole copy to themselves of all that they’ve accessed in the federation.
Cost of hardware is only a fraction of the total cost. Even if we solved the issue of running the Fediverse at scale with negligible costs, we still are not accounting for all the labor of volunteers, instance admins and developers.
I realize that is not how the fediverse works. I’m not speaking about the content delivery as much as the sever orchestration.
That’s why I’m saying if somehow it could work that way, it would be one way to offset the compute and delivery burdens. But it is a very different paradigm from normal hosting. There would have to be some kind of swarmanagement layer that the main instance nodes controlled.
My point was only that, should such a proposal be feasible one day, if you lower the barriers you could have more resources.
I myself have no interest in hosting a full blown private instance of Lemmy or mastodon, but I would happily contribute 1tb of storage and a ton of idle compute to serving the content for my instance if I could. That’s where this thinking stemmed from. Many users like me could donate their “free” idle power and space. But currently it is not feasible.
I realize that is not how the fediverse works. I’m not speaking about the content delivery as much as the sever orchestration.
That’s why I’m saying if somehow it could work that way, it would be one way to offset the compute and delivery burdens. But it is a very different paradigm from normal hosting. There would have to be some kind of swarmanagement layer that the main instance nodes controlled.
My point was only that, should such a proposal be feasible one day, if you lower the barriers you could have more resources.
I myself have no interest in hosting a full blown private instance of Lemmy or mastodon, but I would happily contribute 1tb of storage and a ton of idle compute to serving the content for my instance if I could. That’s where this thinking stemmed from. Many users like me could donate their “free” idle power and space. But currently it is not feasible.
Instead of going for these complicated architectures, it would be better to simplify and make activitypub less dependent on server software.
Great link, and I fully agree. If it’s possible anyways.