Asklemmy

I don’t think there are fully distributed social networks out there today. Even nostr, a Twitter alternative with a basis in blockchain, has the issue that if a “relay” you used to post content goes down, that post disappears. The problem is that all of that data needs to be kept somewhere, and there’s a lot of content to keep.

That's exactly how Hive works by the way, each witness has a copy of the blockchain software, and to run a node and earn money from it, they must "sync" the blockchain and that means running all the blocks software to reproduce all blocks one by one. This process can take hours or days to finish. But afterwards, any node or group of nodes can die and as long as one witness node exists for every microservice (main chain, hive engine side chain for tokens, some metadata chain and there's a few other things ppl have invented idk what for), all data is safe. So as you say, it's expensive and a bit crazy to require everyone to host all the content available but when done it gives some safety to your data.

Hive is not federated tho. It's one thing, just hosted by many with 100% redundance.

I was thinking of doing that, setting up my own server, but for some reason all the communities on the server I'm on (sh.itjust.works) are very small and the ones on lemmy.ml grow a lot, so it makes me think that it's much harder for people to find communities hosted on smaller servers than on big ones? Maybe I'm misreading the reasons.

how much storage space would one need on average if you are a hobbyist self-hoster? If I make my own server and, say, it gets a bit popular with thousands or tens of thousands people, all posting text, images and even videos all day, I imagine I will soon run out of places where to put all my hard drives, not to mention the electricity bill...