It's always talked about in the media as if everyone cares, but I don't think I've ever heard a normal person complain.

For example, Britain's national mapping organisation's brand is associated in our national consciousness with going to a small shop in a quaint village to get a map showing how to walk up a mountain. It's called Ordnance Survey. If that sounds like Artillery Research to you, that's because the project started because the king wanted to know how to accurately bomb Scotland.

When people say there's been an "𝑥 fold increase in such and such." They mean such and such is 𝑥 times as big.

If you get something that actually folds like a sheet of paper, the amount of layers doubles each time. One fold = twice as many layers. Two folds = four times as many layers...

As far as I know this isn't a feature that exists, but I know the protocol should make it fairly easy.

What I'm thinking is for Lemmy to basically have the option to inherit the comment thread when posting a URL to another fediverse service.

E.g. If crossposting a Lemmy thread, you get a tickbox saying "inherit comment section" or something and it makes the new thread effectively a symlink to the original.

This could also be used to bootstrap other fediverse services like pixelfed and peertube by enabling people to comment directly from their Lemmy instance.

Aren't you all surprised by them blocking public rights of way and trying to intimidate anyone who says they should live by the same rules as the rest of us?

I don't know if this is too self-promotey to put in the more serious subs so I'm putting it here. I need to blag being able to do the django framework so I spent a week fannying about with it to make this. Feel free to mess about with it, give feedback or repost it on reddit or any other lemmy knock-offs.

This is a question that comes to mind every time I spend a few days focusing on the fediverse. Normally I'm on the microblogging side, but now I have a Lemmy account it might start a proper discussion.

So, to the point, pretty much every fedi platform has similar problems with small servers taking a beating whenever a post goes viral. This ends up costing the server owner a bunch of money trying to keep their server alive while thousands of instances attempt to pull large static files from the original host's post. This recently instigated this call to action on this forum.

I've never seen the question of torrents answered and it feels like a lot of effort and a bit self entitled to get the ear of fedi software devs to implement torrents as a solution, so I'm putting this here.

If media files were made into torrents when a post was being created, an extra object could be added to post objects like

'torrentcdn': {
  'https://imagePathAsKey.jpg': {
    'infohash': 'ba618eab...',
    'torrentLocation': 'https://directlinkto.torrent',
    'webseed': 'https://imagePathAsKey.jpg',
    ...
  }
}

This would not break compatibility as it would just be ignored by anything not looking for a 'torrentcdn' object, yet up to date instances could use this instead of directly pulling the static files.

This would benefit instances as when a post goes viral, the load would be distributed amongst all instances attempting to download the file.

This could also benefit clients and instances as larger files like short videos could be distributed using webtorrent, massively reducing the load on server when many people are watching the same video.

Thoughts?