Torrent style internet

when downloading torrents you have a bunch of seeders and maybe most won't be online, but some will be. I'm so so tired with services and monopolies. Do you think it would be possible to create an internet where instead of large servers we just have individuals hosting their email service, the communities they like to post in and sharing files. essentially it's just torrent with email and message board

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You should check out IPFS which is pretty similar to what you're describing, at least for file storage (which can be used to host web content).

Thanks, yep. found that after some research. found some email client with ipfs and proof of replication but it's some crypto scam shit that's dead anyways

Unfortunately a lot of the IPFS community seems to have been inundated with crypto nonsense. Which is a shame, since I think the basic idea is a good one.

You're sort of describing Freenet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenet

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I never got to use that Internet.

Not many people did. Universities and government mostly.

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Yep, back when nothing was encrypted and all email was trusted. There was peace at the beginning then scammers and spammers found out everything was trusted and started spamming the hell out of everyone.

People would enter credit card info into random web forms what would store the full info in email hosted by that party.

Then fraud became a huge issue, email got dmarc spf dkim checks, websites where mandated to have https, and credit card and private info had laws about safe storage and liability.

There were also a lot fewer users, you could host a simple website for thousands of viewers easy but now scaling for 10s of thousands of viewers if your site is linked from a popular source could easily take you down.

However it is still 100% possible to host your own stuff, the technical know how however is a barrier for most.

You are describing IPFS. If you install IPFS, then browse to some IPFS content (like a wikipedia mirror: ipns://en.wikipedia-on-ipfs.org/wiki/), that's cached on your system, if someone else requests those assets, your computer will help distribute it. You can "pin" content, keeping/seeding a copy.

I'm working on the beginnings of a project which is aiming to do exactly this -- I agree; the Fediverse is already a huge step in this direction, but I think it'd be possible to go even further, such that "your content" is often being hosted by your own machine instead of depending on an instance operator somewhere to do it, and I think there would be some big advantages to doing it that way.

Unlike actual mature solutions which others have proposed in this thread, it's in this very early infancy stage, but I'm working this weekend on the update which was supposed to be ready in "1-2 weeks" 2+ weeks ago.

/c/grits@lemmy.world, grits project discussion / updates

ipfs proof of replication?

You watch Silicon Valley recently? Haha

not recently lol. after doing some research i sadly discovered that crypto has taken a big fat shit on the general publics oppinion of ipfs and proof of replication. filecoin etc. greeeeeeeed is cancer

Yeah I am not very versed in crypto but the greedyness of it put a big stink on it for me.

would it be possible to have some traffic encypted, like PM and email etc over a similar protocol like torrents. everyone who wants to use the new web just allocates a certain amount on their hard drive with encryptions and stuff. I know i must sound like a child but it doesn't sound impossible. am i crazy?

oh, allocating like 100gb per user would become more expensive for AI bots as well right?

I can think of two projects with this type of idea In mind;

Freenet @ https://www.hyphanet.org/index.html

Threefold @ https://threefold.io

They are both working distributed internet platforms. Threefold is more commercial and has a method to pay you for your bandwidth via crypto currency. Freenet is free speech based and against censorship.

Is that not what the Fediverse is though? I mean in essence?