mccThere is an interesting article titled "Please Don’t Share Our Links on Mastodon: Here’s Why!" about the startling load that Mastodon's mass-distributed link preview generation has on small independent webservers. But I cannot link it to you, because of a reason
Alex Rosenberg@mcc Isn't this pretty much an ideal use of the Torrent protocol? Map all the link preview resources into a CAS and then pull the bits from random other federation sites instead of the source site. At most, upgrade the protocol with a new hash since SHA-1 has been collided.
@alexr that's interesting, but you'd still have to pick an authoritative SHA.
@mcc The initial hash list would have to come with the first referencing post. Unless somebody better at math could make a proof of how many sites would have to agree on hashes for something to be considered extremely likely to be authentic, without resorting to any sort of overly complex computation like blockchain.
@mcc I keep flashing back to Harry Chesley's Rumor Monger app and the paper he based it on: Xerox PARC's “Epidemic Algorithms for Replicated Database Maintenance”
Some initial set of servers could fetch the resources and then based on “federation reputation values" share the hashes epidemically.