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@ItsThatDeafGuy @WiteWulf Not at all a thing of the past. It's the thing of the future. But it's straining the AP model that doesn't properly factor identity, publication, and data hosting. We will solve this, but it's not going to happen immediately. It takes engineering work.

@dalias

@ItsThatDeafGuy 👋 notes that "free" is largely part of the past, and I think there's some truth in that:

It could mean users paya huge central host to keep it afloat as it tries to manage bajillions of users uploading umptygazillion media files, and any failure gets felt by all users.

Or it could be that more folks obtain their own domain, set up their own $5/month VPS, and run their own instances independent of the problems at the central site. Maybe they avail those services to friends/family allowing free participation for some folks.

But the AP model scales fairly nicely as the decentralization grows as @WiteWulf opens with.

Cassandrich

@WiteWulf @gumnos @ItsThatDeafGuy That problem only exists because the social ecosystem is also the hosting. There's no reason that has to be. In an extreme solution you could imagine all the media being p2p shared by the folks who follow or otherwise come to interact with it.

@dalias @gumnos @ItsThatDeafGuy yeah, the way the media is distributed is something AP will need to address in the future, I think. But P2P brings its own problems, notably caching, when AP is designed to enable editing and deleting of content in a timely manner. Someone in my replies mentioned blockchain 😂

@WiteWulf

ActivityPub/ActivityStreams allows for instances to cache media from external instances, so depending on whether instances choose to do that (some do, some don't), you could either get media requests per-server (scales roughly with a nebulous decentralization-factor) or per-user (which can drag a machine to its knees for popular posts)

(and please no blockchain! 😂)

@dalias @ItsThatDeafGuy

@gumnos @WiteWulf @ItsThatDeafGuy You can mix those two and have cache on first access by local user.

@WiteWulf @gumnos @ItsThatDeafGuy P2P is not incompatible with editing. Thinking it is is mixing up the functions of publication and hosting.