Disclaimer: I wrote this article and made this website.

There was some talk of this issue in the recent fediverse inefficiencies thread. I’m hopeful that in the future we’ll have a decentralized solution for file hosting but for now I deeply believe that users should pay for their own file hosting.

    • cum
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      12 hours ago

      To actually keep data persistent on IPFS and not be deleted by the garbage collector, you need to have a server(s) pin the node that holds that data.

      You either host these servers yourself, or pay providers to store it for you.

      And at that point you just reinvented a server simply hosting your data but with extra steps.

      • @sosodev@lemmy.worldOP
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        210 hours ago

        Thank you for pointing that out. I’m not familiar with IPFS but I tend to agree there’s no free lunch here. People think you can wave the blockchain wand and free computing appears but there’s always costs built in somewhere.

    • osaerisxero
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      319 hours ago

      I expect something like this to end up being the solution, but I think we’re far from a consensus in that regard.

      • hendrik
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        16 hours ago

        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.