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Comment by mariusor | Hacker News Reader

It's also at odds with how people consume content.

If you cram every social interaction a network has in a massive common distributed store (which is what using a bittorrent like protocol would entail) you have every node requiring to consume gigabytes over gigabytes of content, despite being interested in a fraction of a fraction of it.

I don't know if nostr or scuttlebutt resolve this issue, but if they don't ... how do you imagine a mobile app for keeping in touch with your grandma, requiring gigabytes of data transfer and storage would work?

At this point people saying bittorrent is a solution for social networks are basically just the guys who know about hammers and seeing nothing but nails.

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I'm advocating it as the content distribution layer, not the social interaction layer. You don't even need all of the metadata, as there are BEP extensions to distribute that as an index [0] or an RSS-style feed [1]. Images are particularly painful, like the previews in Mastodon, because they hammer the origin server rather than looking around at what other peers have. This problem will only get worse as the federation grows in size, both in users and in servers.

I say irony because we had all these scaling problems two decades ago during the peak P2P years, including federation and implicit DDoSing, and BitTorrent emerged as the lasting protocol because it could handle the scaling issues.

I say tragedy because for this to work you do need some openness, which puts people at risk of content companies trolling for you, ISPs dropping you, and is completely antithetical to the control Silicon Valley demands over its users and data.

[0]: http://bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0049.html

[1]: http://bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0039.html

Then the fediverse is already there. The video hosting service PeerTube uses bittorrent to distribute the video among viewers.

There were some plans at one point for another project which would deal with music and would host the media on IPFS. Sadly I've never seen any progress on it, despite the idea sounding very good.

It’s not so much Silicon Valley demanding that control as Hollywood

The mobile app isn't a peer in this hypothetical torrent network. Your mastodon instance is and it serves you using the same client protocol we have right now.

That way, you solve for the potential hosting issues of smaller hosts not being able to handle the load in case of viral posts etc, all without the clients having to know anything about the implementation details.

If you still require servers that you need to connect to then you kind of lose the benefit of having a social network over a p2p protocol. Or you're also thinking that the social serving aspect is parallel to the media serving aspect that another sibling mentioned.

Modern smartphones are like the computers end of the 90's.

We've run back than Napster and later eDonkey on those boxes just fine…

Yes, but you were downloading a movie and then you'd delete it to make room for something else on your 40GB HDD. In this case it would be like you'd try to download the whole internet because you're interested in one movie.

It's possible to download parts of torrents though.

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