for the longest time a lot of images posted to reddit were really posted on imgur (until they started hosting it on their own, too). is there a fediverse’d imgur we should be using to complement lemmy? its docs say it shouldn’t be used for large images and videos.
pixelfed seems more like a federated flickr or instagram, not just simple image/album hosting like imgur. thoughts? ty 💙
I think some sort of p2p solution would be really cool. You could basically allocate a certain amount of storage on your server and images would be stored and grabbed by peers as needed. Something like BitTorrent where multiple peers have the same content to reduce load. Not sure if it already exists or is even practically possible.
It exists/existed: https://www.bittorrent.com/token/bittorrent-file-system/
I don’t think anyone ever used it.
IPFS can work in a similar way but storage is a lot less persistent. You need to tell the software manually to keep certain files or they’ll disappear from your server. However, there are paid IPFS servers that will keep your images around for you, for all of IPFS to retrieve.
Most of IPFS seemed to be served from two gateways (Cloudflare + IPFS.io) because those are the fastest and most likely to have cached the files you’re looking for. However, you can get the file from the IPFS network directly if you’re willing to wait a while (between 10 seconds and a minute in my experience).
someone beat me to it but yeah, i think something like ipfs is trying to be the sort of p2p decentralized storage solution. i like your thinking of bittorrent :D
Yeah, I see a lot of comments about ipfs. I’ll be checking it out.