Most of the problems in the current internet landscape is caused by the cost of centralized servers. What problems are stopping us from running the fediverse on a peer to peer torrent based network? I would assume latency, but couldn’t that be solved by larger pre caching in clients? Of course interaction and authentication should be handled centrally, but media sharing which is the largest strain on servers could be eased by clients sending media between each other. What am I missing? Torrenting seems to be such an elegant solution.
What if not everyone had to be a seeder?
You rapidly end up with a freeloader issue.
not if you give benefits to seeder, just like private trackers
The trackers themselves are centralized. The .torrent file you download from a private tracker has a unique private ID tied to your account, which the torrent client advertises to the tracker when it phones home to the announce URL, alongside your leech/seed metadata.
Don’t see how this is much different to today’s way of doing things where pretty much everyone is a freeloader to the centralized server. The major benefit is that it doesn’t have to be just one server anymore.