Federated file share exists. Lemmy is, at its core, a link aggregator. Not disagreeing that it would be cool, but would be a lot of work.
this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2023
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Honestly I'm not sure if we need file sharing to be federated. Just put up a link somewhere and let people download.
Or use torrents (with web seeds should no other seeders be around) if the files are gigantic enough
Storage is the issue, all of these instances are volunteer based so we want to avoid burdening them with storage costs. For example when renting a VPS (as many Lemmy instances do) the monthly rate jumps pretty quick with storage capacity. Some instances do allow small local uploads, the one I use allows 100kb and that limit is based on operating cost.
I've been thinking: What if we add ipfs into the mix?
Still, you need hardware (disks). Speed is a problem, but not the main problem lomg term.
I was actually thinking about creating my own instance if I plan on migrating my forum to Lemmy. I don't mean to freeload, especially since I do pay the hosting fees for the forum.
Goes along with the whole idea of Open Source. If you don't like something, change it yourself. I'm not an expert admin or programmer, but I do have some limited experience. I've actually taken advantage of the do it yourself potential of FOSS a few times myself, hosted some servers, modified some software. Nothing big, but little tweaks here and there. It's very empowering.
Still, I think an option like this should be in the software, so I'll try and open a feature request first, if it doesn't work, I don't plan to fork it to be honest. I have to maintain it myself, not to mention if people start contributing, it'll become a full time job maintaining that thing. I just can't do that right now. I'll probably just give up on the idea. Cuz even if I don't accept any pr's from anyone, I still have to manually implement the changes every release. And even if I do write a script to do it, eventually it'll break and I have to mod it and... just too much work on top of maintaining the forum with the free time I currently have.
I think it is more sustainable to collect those files in a git repository somewhere where they can be easily found and curated.
But in general the image hosting system used by Lemmy is relatively format agnostic and could probably also host other file-types with only minor changes.
The main concern is storage. If people start storing more stuff, that increases the costs of running the instance.
So I think it makes a ton more sense for lemmy to integrate with existing hosting solutions. Ideally users would be able to upload stuff to their own accounts elsewhere and lemmy would go fetch it as needed.
I meant as in opening my own instance, thus, all of the hosting fees are on me (and a few other people, but mostly me). I currently run that forum, so I pay the hosting fees, things aren't gonna change much if just switch to another platform.
The thing is (correct me if I'm wrong), if other instances federate with you, they'll be hosting a copy of the data you store. For images this is manageable (although animated images are basically video), but it will quickly run into the gigabytes range.
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