Mastodawn

Aral Balkan Nov 8, 2022

This stuff is never free anywhere but the scale of Big Tech insulates you from it somewhat.

I actually think it’s good to be reminded that our ability to communicate comes with a cost – in terms of resources, environmental impact, etc., not just money.

But, equally, it also makes the case that a system optimised to host hundreds of thousands of people on a single instance is not also somehow magically optimised to host just one person.

The latter is the problem I’m exploring with #SmallWeb.

@aral Big Tech did not insulate us from paying for services, they used our personal data to pay for it. Big Tech also made it so that nobody needed fiber optics because they did all the processing.

@gert @aral An interesting question. What would a more distributed framework look like? What would it require?

For example, to make something like Youtube without that centralization would be *extremely* difficult, it demands hierarchical caching.

@Elucidating @aral I think Peertube is a hybrid using both AP and P2P protocols. It's all about protocols.

@gert @aral I agree about the protocols bit. I managed some of the infrastructure and I work with some of the other infrastructure that makes Youtube. The amount of bandwidth required to do youtube (or netflix if we go back a few years) would crush the internet. P2P increases this problem dramatically.

Peertube is cool for what it is, but it fundamentally cannot handle a substantial fraction of YT's volume. We'd need to leverage caching more.

@gert @aral I can talk more about what that looks like if you don't know and would like to. It's not impossible. But I don't think folks have really considered things like "open source, verifiable, community lead network caching infrastructure" very much. It's an interesting space few people really understand the impact of.

@Elucidating @aral You mean something like IPFS run by communities? Sounds good to me. 😃

@gert @aral Perhaps, but we'd need to find something more fit-for-purpose than IPFS.

@Elucidating @aral I'm all ears..

@gert @aral IDK if it exists. What makes youtube work is a series of expensive hierarchical caches distributed globally. There are parts of the world where this network is thin and youtube is really a suboptimal experience.

I dunno if folks really realize how much geography affects their internet. Odds are, most Americans have participating caches peered with their provider's hardware.

@gert @aral The main challenge is finding a way to distribute hot datasets to people in a way that doesn't run back to backbones and choke the life out of them. People don't realize, but a lot of the money and capital of various streaming services and content providers goes into caching infrastructure.

Gert V 🇵🇸

@Elucidating @aral Which they probably call CDN. IPFS is more like a shared filesystem..

@gert @aral Yes, we typically call this a "CDN" although I think that it's a bit imprecise. Some folks actually have network assets backing it, whereas others just have machines globally that can sync+serve.