A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).
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We totally need sustainable file hosting. Freedom!
Wait... the fuck did you just upload? Oh god. Oh god no. Do I have to call the cops on you? Oh no. Wait, does this count as possession? FUCK!!!!!!
We need someone else to handle the totally sustainable file hosting. Freedom!
Yep, there needs to be moderation tools that can be quickly deployed to stop the illegal/immoral/evil stuff from spreading and taking over self-hosted servers.
And moderation of this kind of content almost always sounds like torture when you hear about what facebook and the like are outsourcing.
Theoretically, this is a good problem for computer vision/machine learning. But there are a LOT of false positives (I think it was Aftermath who did an article on a study of when a nipple becomes female?). And.. what ethical responsibility do you have to report on the fiftieth time that SheIsReallyAnEightThousandYearOldDragon_6969 uploaded CSAM? And how quick do you think people are going to lose faith in you and start wondering if you'll also report on the rampant piracy?
And... there are also false negatives. At which point you find out you have been hosting something truly heinous for the past few months... possibly when local law enforcement tells you.
Like a lot of things: it sounds great. But nobody in their right mind is going to host this for free. And once you start accepting money you start opening yourself up to a LOT of regulations.
Illegal I can begrudgingly agree with. Even though I am a proponent for piracy, I will conceed that for growth's sake, the tools need a clear well defined path to moderation.
That being said, who's to say what IS immoral and evil?
In the republicans minds, porn is evil and should be banned. Trans rights are evil and should be banned. Abortion is evil and should be banned.
I disagree with all those claims. I do not think any of them are immoral, or evil.
I think pineapple on pizza is wrong, and evil. Some agree, others don't. If I had my way, promoting of pineapple on pizza would be banned.
Now, who's to say what is, and what isn't evil? I think the only clear line to a moderation approach is to have a clear, unquestionable set of rules. These rules are to be based on public laws.
Everything else, I feel you should have the freedom to do as you wish. But also, I believe other people that you don't agree with should be free to do as they wish.
You may never know how someone feels, or understand their perspective, but as long as they aren't breaking laws, I feel they should have the ability to feel that way consequence free.
I may not like that you put pineapples on your pizza, but I feel that you should have the right to enjoy it. Even if it goes against MY views as to what constitutes a REAL pizza! Much to my surprise, pineapple on pizza ISN'T illegal. So you should have the right to enjoy it......
And yes. I did take the most pandtentic example I could think of, in order to display the absurdity of the concept of how easy it is to accept others rights in this world that don't affect you.
Now just apply that same concept to every other example in the world. Then take into consideration that by using vague undefined terms to define your rules, you create grey area that's easy to exploit. Who's to say what IS evil? Adults told their teenagers in the 1950s that Elvis was evil. Parents in the 1920s told their teenagers that jazz was evil.
We need to define the terms that define our rules.
In the federated world it's the moderators and admins who get to make the rules and/or decide what they deem appropriate. It's as simple as that.
Seems to me that this is a use-case ~~Freenet~~ Hyphanet would be good for, both because it distributes the problem of file storage load and because it eliminates responsibility for each host to police his node by making it impossible for anyone to know which file chunks said node is hosting.
Nothing solves the problem of CSAM quite like... making everyone partially culpable in the storage and distribution of CSAM.
You can't prove I was hosting child porn. Statistically, we all only had a 70% probability of having it on our computers
Stuff that isn't accessed eventually gets deleted. If the Lemmy instances (which are clearnet, of course) delete the references to it, it would go away.
Which gets back to volunteers going through and moderating it. And the ethical and moral question of whether people who upload it are reported.
And... honestly? if there is even a 20% chance that running a file sharing node (because I just love to give away both bandwidth and storage...) is being used to store CSAM? I ain't doing that shit and most people will similarly run screaming and call the cops.
Ok, hear me out.
We find the users with the slowest internet and start sending them all the data. They don’t have to keep anything on disk. Then they send it all back and forth between each other. Any time a user makes a request, we just wait for one of the slow nodes to come across the data and send it out.
We use the slowest wires for all the storage. It’s fool proof.
Somebody actually did make this as a joke years ago haha https://github.com/yarrick/pingfs
I was brushing my teeth when reading this comment and inadvertently ended up swallowing all my toothpaste.
Too wet for server racks in the forest.
They grew there
Look I know there called "farms" but like I told the last forest gnome, the dank woods is no place to host data.
Have you considered providing something like this: https://jortage.com/ and maybe contribute to their efforts to develop a specific API for that? Source code is here: https://github.com/jortage
Jortage is a really interesting approach. It definitely helps reduce the impact of the file hosting problem but it doesn’t fully address the underlying cost issue. The cost of storing files grows every month indefinitely while donations typically don’t.
I would like to see a file hosting pool come to lemmy though. So I will look into it. :)
Pict-rs that is used by Lemmy to store images already supports S3 type storage, so in theory it should work with Jortage, but I don't think anybody has tested that yet. The people behind Feddit.org might have experimented with it as they expressed interest a while back.
IPFS?
as I stated in this comment it's not really feasible as to ~5s delay that was tested some time ago.
Is file hosting really a must? I mean Reddit and feddit are basically forums. And not many forums allow file uploads. Also, we should have retention limits. Low value posts are allowed to fade away. High value posts that have some level of interaction stay alive longer.
People forget why Imgur was created
A lot of pictures and memes get posted here. And every other post shows a thumbnail picture. These images are all files.
Not denying that. But maybe we should accept that photos and memes and whatnot aren’t that valuable and limit their size or the volume allowed per user. Just a thought.
Yeah, I wonder if that would fly with the users. I just scrolled through my timeline and nearly every post has some colorful image to it. (except in Ask Lemmy and No Stupid Questions.) I'm not sure if users would accept this platform if it were mostly textual. And putting restrictions in place would certainly reduce the number of images. Scrolling through Lemmy would feel like Hackernews, not any modern social media platform. I doubt mainstream people appreciate that.
But yeah, that'd be possible. We could just close the meme communities for example. Or exclude them from individual instances to save some space there.
limit their size or the volume allowed per user
Fedi software like Misskey already did exactly that. Each user have limited "drive" which can be upgraded/customized per user. People even reuse image they already have on their drive, so it won't be any duplicate files.
You're not the first to think about this.
See https://aumetra.xyz/posts/the-fedi-ddos-problem - there an embed server is proposed, to be shared by multiple instances (ideally a great many would use just the one), which can host things like image files and previews.
This feels like something the Fediverse is ultimately going to build for itself. I know jack squat about the details, but it's gonna have to be a thing eventually, I think.
I think IPFS could help the fediverse with storage.
I expect something like this to end up being the solution, but I think we're far from a consensus in that regard.
I think most architecture design decisions are made by the developers of the fediverse projects. If the 3 Lemmy devs or the Mastodon maintainers agreed to do it... (And it's technically feasible.) I suppose it could be done.
I mean as long as it works seemlessly and doesn't violate ActivityPub, we don't really need a consensus of all the users and admins. We just need the server admins to install the next update.
Interesting approach, good luck! Admittedly I'm not sure if many users want to take their media uploading in their own hands and pay for it but maybe I'm wrong. Where are the images stored? Do you have your own hardware? Backups etc?
Also since you're interested in Fediverse media storage, I recently read about https://jortage.com/ It's a third party storage for your instance with deduplication, pretty interesting idea. Takes away a bit of the federated part though
Is a p2p system for media with the instances just hosting magnet links too slow for fediverse purposes? To me this seems like the most resilient way to handle media in a decentralized system
I wish there was some version of PBS for Lemmy, like public funds for hosting. I'll admit I haven't really thought this through, so there's probably some problems with my idea.
At least as far as US law is concerned, a federally hosted and administrated social media platform gets interesting with America's unusually strong free speech laws, since there's content which is legal but unethical which they likely would not be allowed to block or moderate, such as bullying, hate speech, misinformation, etc. but also illegal content would be immediately moderated away, which might include content that falls into legal grey areas or ethical but technically illegal content, like someone copy/pasting the contents of a paywalled article, or discussing any kind of DRM or digital security bypass
Honestly I think there's good reason for governments to host a Mastodon instance for their representatives to use for communications, but inviting the public to use it might get weird for sure
Oh yeah, I totally agree with you that governments should at least host their own Mastodon instances. I thought it was weird when Twitter became the go to for communication from the US Government.
I think Tenfingers could be an interesting option as hosters do not know what they host, the data can be modified, and it's 100% decentralised.
Personally I'm in the camp that I want history to be lost. That's part of the appeal to me. In fact my favorite feature in the fedi is Mastodon's option to enable auto-deleting posts of a certain age.
Only content that is explicitly pinned or reaches a certain amount of interactions should be saved imo. Since that's the stuff you'd actually want to preserve rather than the 99% of forgettable content, and it would also drastically cut down on file hosting.
Another thing is that a federation should only act as the exchange between users on ActivityPub. It should only cache relevant information and not be expected to store everything, like I wrote before. The user should be a portable account that is stored on a device. The federation server would sync your account between your devices, but not store it. You send your content to the federation, and then the federation sends it out into the world where they choose to do what they want with it. The federation shouldn't hoard it indefinitely.
Also this makes sense from a privacy perspective. If you care about privacy, why would you also want all your data indefinitely stored? Unless certain things are relevant and explicitly kept, it should be expected to expire and be lost by default. Where did we get this expectation that data should be stored forever? Also you expect it to be stored forever and not be trained on by AI?
This comment for example, after about a week or two most of the visibility and interaction of it will drop to zero. At that point, this comment should expire and no longer exist. I wrote this comment, it reached some people, and served it's purpose and should expire. I'm not going to pretend like this comment is some kind of historic document that should be indefinitely preserved, nor do I expect or want it to be.
Can you judge a work of art by it's virality? Should you judge by virality?
A lot of times in history artists got recognition they deserved only after their death. When they ware alive they lived in poverty struggling to make ends meet.
There is a lot of internet 1.0 preserved by internet archive that I didn't get to experience. There are flash games that I would love to preserve and show the next generation.
We wouldn't have known how Scotts Cawthon games have looked like before he made FNAF if not for the preservation efforts.
What is stopping some big giant, let's say Yahoo/Verizon from buying a shitload of storage, starting their own private instance which is open to the public, but private in the sense that only Verizon employees are admins and mods. Only Verizon controls things. Then advertise to the point that the average person on the street knows that Verizon.Lemmy exists, and assosiates Lemmy with being a Verizon thing? What is stopping big tech from pouring the money required for this concept to take off, and using their control over their instance from making the decentralized a centralized service in the general public's minds?
Right now Lemmy is 60k people. Ok. What if Lemmy was 200 million people, and only 60k knew it was a decentralized service? Everyone else just thought Verizon owned Lemmy?
Isnt this the exact reason why there was such concern over the idea of Threads federating with the fediverse at large?
I know I'm not necessarily the target audience for this. But it feels too expensive. 6x the price of Cloudflare R2, almost 13x the price of Wasabi. Even iCloud storage is $0.99 for 50 GB with a 5 GB free tier. But again, I know I'm not necessarily the target audience as I have a lot of technical skills that maybe average users don't have.
If you ever get around to building an API, and are interested in partnerships, let me know. Maybe there is a possibility for integration into [email protected] 😉.