Disclaimer: I wrote this article and made this website.
There was some talk of this issue in the recent fediverse inefficiencies thread. I’m hopeful that in the future we’ll have a decentralized solution for file hosting but for now I deeply believe that users should pay for their own file hosting.
I think IPFS could help the fediverse with storage.
I expect something like this to end up being the solution, but I think we’re far from a consensus in that regard.
I think most architecture design decisions are made by the developers of the fediverse projects. If the 3 Lemmy devs or the Mastodon maintainers agreed to do it… (And it’s technically feasible.) I suppose it could be done.
I mean as long as it works seemlessly and doesn’t violate ActivityPub, we don’t really need a consensus of all the users and admins. We just need the server admins to install the next update.
To actually keep data persistent on IPFS and not be deleted by the garbage collector, you need to have a server(s) pin the node that holds that data.
You either host these servers yourself, or pay providers to store it for you.
And at that point you just reinvented a server simply hosting your data but with extra steps.
Thank you for pointing that out. I’m not familiar with IPFS but I tend to agree there’s no free lunch here. People think you can wave the blockchain wand and free computing appears but there’s always costs built in somewhere.