This is a question that comes to mind every time I spend a few days focusing on the fediverse. Normally I’m on the microblogging side, but now I have a Lemmy account it might start a proper discussion.
So, to the point, pretty much every fedi platform has similar problems with small servers taking a beating whenever a post goes viral. This ends up costing the server owner a bunch of money trying to keep their server alive while thousands of instances attempt to pull large static files from the original host’s post. This recently instigated this call to action on this forum.
I’ve never seen the question of torrents answered and it feels like a lot of effort and a bit self entitled to get the ear of fedi software devs to implement torrents as a solution, so I’m putting this here.
If media files were made into torrents when a post was being created, an extra object could be added to post objects like
'torrentcdn': {
'https://imagePathAsKey.jpg': {
'infohash': 'ba618eab...',
'torrentLocation': 'https://directlinkto.torrent',
'webseed': 'https://imagePathAsKey.jpg',
...
}
}
This would not break compatibility as it would just be ignored by anything not looking for a ‘torrentcdn’ object, yet up to date instances could use this instead of directly pulling the static files.
This would benefit instances as when a post goes viral, the load would be distributed amongst all instances attempting to download the file.
This could also benefit clients and instances as larger files like short videos could be distributed using webtorrent, massively reducing the load on server when many people are watching the same video.
Thoughts?
Bit torrent is optimized for “lots of users downloading large files over low-bandwidth connections” which is sorta the opposite of this scenario.
My understanding of the bit torrent protocol is that it’s not very efficient for “small” files or low latency. The overhead of connecting could add latency that effects the end user experience.
I’m thinking in terms of what happens when someone on a $5 VPS hosting plan uploads a large image or small video and a thousand other instances want to grab it. The latency of a torrent isn’t as much of a problem as the server falling over. This is for propogation between servers rather than when a user requests a file.