Replying to Avatar Sirius

While relays and file upload services are a simple and effective way to get started, I think p2p is the future.

Running a relay or file uploader is expensive, and you need content moderation. On the other hand, p2p is "free" because people are already paying for their own internet access and on-device storage, or even cloud storage. P2p is also much more censorship resistant.

Video hosting is so expensive that I imagine it will be the first thing to be moved onto bittorrent. If you don't like torrenting with random people, you could connect to people in your Nostr social network.

When Nostr becomes popular and free relays dwindle, maybe p2p becomes more common for event sync as well. Direct connections are also better for DM privacy.

If bittorrent is too clunky for general-purpose file sharing, we can devise our own file sharing on Nostr. Nostr is already based on content-addressed events. Just need a binary format and some standard for file chunking.
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Ingwie Phoenix (aka. birb) 2y ago

First: That cover image is dope. Dunno why, i just like it.

As for file-sharing over Nostr: There have been proposals to handle WebRTC bootstrapping over Nostr events - the same approach, and more, can be used for file-sharing too. What, however, I don't see being so easy is moving the tasks relays do into a p2p network - the purpose is to have multiple relays to increase the censorship resistance. p2p networks are often sporadic and can collapse any time, they aren't really that stable. Personally, I think that as long as people are interested, free relays will keep existing. Heck, I run my own and whoever finds it is free to use it - I just don't guarantee for it to stick around, and you shouldn't trust this with any other relay too.

What would be interesting is if we could move the announce-part of a torrent into Nostr to bootstrap peering. It certainly is possible and there are tools like libp2p that could be facilitated - or just Webtorrent itself. So, look into the NIP proposals, maybe there is something that you could pick up, modify, hack a client together, and show off =) I'd certainly be interested in this.

Think Youtube-over-Nostr but with the videos coming from other peers watching the same video or provided on dedicated servers? Who knows.

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