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Do you think Federated networks are the future or do you think Peer to Peer networks are the future? Which do you think is better? (lemmy.dbzer0.com)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Alright so I'm not an expert so I might not be explaining it correctly.

Federated Network: Multiple instances sharing content, such as Lemmy

Peer to Peer Network: There is no "instances", just peers. Many peers sharing content. Every user is a peer. There is no server costs, because every device connected to the network is acting like a mini-server. It will cost your device some storage space and network bandwith depending on the how the software is designed.

Or do you think Centralized servers are still gonna dominate the future?

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[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 year ago (6 children)

The problem with peer to peer is that it would require you to have stuff saved on your device and my sister can’t even keep her phone “empty enough” with 256GB so I think local “hubs” is the better right now.

Isn’t it essentially similar to the dark net that has been going like that successfully since forever ?

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (5 children)

With distributed hash tables it is manageable. You do something like "store three copies on three peers" and as long as one of them is online the post is accessible. This is actually better than the way lemmy does it now. In principle each lemmy server stores the posts from its communities, and a copy of each post from communities its users are subscribed to. But since all instances are federated so well, in practice each of the 1000 lemmy instances stores a copy of almost every post ever made. That's like 100GB x1000. With a DHT, the amount of space used on each user's device is on average the amount of posts one user makes x3, no more.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

Yeah I have serious concerns about how it will scale.

Luckily storage is the cheapest thing generally.

Maybe down the line they can start using varying degrees of cold storage for older content. Cheaper to store but more expansive to access.

[–] shrugal 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

We could also just delete stuff after some time. Nobody really needs the 1000th repost of a meme from 20 years ago.

[–] demesisx 6 points 1 year ago

If they’re storing it right, it is content addressed, meaning that their servers are aware of duplicates because each file is hashed.

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