Replying to Duvel

I'm not familiar with Blossom servers, but I know they're used to serve media from for Nostr. In the slide it mentions distributed blobs. Does this means it uses the bitTorrent protocol?
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Arjen 2mo ago 💬 1

Blossom servers are normal webservers with prefifned endpoints. Files are stored and accessed using their sha256 hash (as filename).

If you then upload a picture and reference it in you nostr post for example. People can fetch that image not just from the server you referenced but from any other blossom server that holds a copy of the file.

And because the filename is the hash you can guarantee that the file hasn't been meddled with (malware) by a server you get it from.

So no, BitTorrent is not involved and it's not a peer-to-peer system.

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Duvel 2mo ago 💬 1

That is interesting. Thank you for explaining. Is it a cdn-like setup with caching?

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Arjen 1mo ago

Yes, you get a bit into semantics here but my view of it is that blossom is the procol that by its nature allows easy formation of a CDN.

It's unlike legacy CDNs (like CloudFlare) where you need to trust one large party.

Caching and saving in blossom are the same, really. You can keep all videos/images you watch on nostr for 2 weeks and then drop them. In the meantime you can allow friends/family to load the files from your blossom instead of the original poster which might be on the other side of the world...