It looks like the relay might be the bottleneck. If I'm understanding the protocol correctly, a relay could consume less than the whole network so it doesn't have to be ridiculously expensive to operate, but I'm not finding examples of people doing it.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com 5 points 4 days ago (5 children)

A firehose relay takes TB's of storage

which is similar nonsense which ActivityPub has with replicating whole datasets everywhere.. cept its one company controlling the whole shebang. its a failure of design.

[–] 9point6@lemmy.world 5 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (4 children)

My friend, it's not nonsense, it's basically how decentralised communication has to work if you want any reasonable level of recency & history in the data.

Usenet was basically the original and I believe a modern news provider requires something like 50 petabytes of storage to run a 10 year data retention service

[–] Cris_Color@lemmy.world 2 points 4 days ago (3 children)

Not the person you replied to-

I don't follow why it would be necessary, would you mind expanding on why its needed for decentralized interaction to function the way users would expect?

(Also I recognize that might be a huge can of worms, if you do mind thats perfectly understandable. You seem more knowledgable than myself and its an issue I'm very curious about, so it seemed worth asking :)

[–] Kichae@lemmy.ca 1 points 15 hours ago

From my experience, how people expect it to work is to be centralized and neutrally hosted, with instances acting as dumb portals, mainframe+terminal style. So it cannot work as people expect and be decentralized.

load more comments (2 replies)