As a fun little experiment, @damon and I worked together to get a #Mastodon instance up and running that stores media on #IPFS! It was an interesting learning experience.
I don’t think we’re ready to announce anything yet, as this was in service of another project in development. But, there’s an increasing number of ways to host content on an IPFS node service, and tie it back to platforms like Mastodon using an S3-compatible API for Object Storage and some proxying.
This is all pretty rudimentary, but the big-brain realization is that a more robust version could be done by pairing Minio to s3x if we wanted to self-host an IPFS node with those specific features.
@deadsuperhero
I expect more of this, not just re #IPFS but as #p2p systems are happening, storage models will change for the better. #Autonomi is the project I'm most familiar with and they have already talked about this and have partners ready to upload their data. They are not yet revealed, but I wouldn't be surprised if replacing AWS was in there.
I'm working on a demo myself in the area of web publishing and browsing, and am very excited about this whole area, so I wish you luck. @damon
@ilja So far, the easiest workaround (that was surprisingly easy for us) was to use an Object Storage service that puts everything in IPFS, but serves it back with an S3-compatible API.
After a lot of bumping around and figuring out the pieces, it ended up working better than expected! In practice, though, it just works like regular Object Storage. A next step might be to try to make Mastodon serve back the CID and render it directly, instead of proxying the S3 endpoint.
There’s some valid questions as to whether this brings decent benefits, of if it’s just a hype technology that’s mostly drawbacks. I’m not totally sure yet.
That said, I can think of a few narrow applications where something like this might actually be really interesting, like a Fediverse cache for URL and media previews for instances, or some kind of limited holdover service for media and data for an instance that’s bitten the dust.
Anyway, interesting learning experience, might be able to do something with it.
@deadsuperhero I don't get why you see so "few narrow applications". IPFS storage could be used to store the media (videos, sounds). We then could hope that every instance where someone follow you will get the toot and store the attachments in their local IPFS node. So, the more popular your content become, the more it is available, à la BitTorrent. You then can selfhost on your instance and no longer need costly CDN, S3. Benefits seems obvious to me but I may miss something 🤔
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