I'm not really a fan of storing the images on the blockchain itself. When the blockchain get bloated, we will need to upgrade all the hardware for running the Blurt nodes. That makes it more expensive for witnesses and even more so for RPC node operators.
It's way cheaper to use S3 storage with an image server than it will be to run a node with a bloated blockchain.
I think the Jackal idea is probably better.
It's definitely good to decentralize. That will eliminate the single point of failure that is the situation we have right now.
In the beginning there was another witness who was running his own image server. When he left Blurt, all the images that were uploaded to his server got lost.
Yes, indeed.
Jackal charges a fee for use of their chain and protocol of course, but that cost can be passed on to the user by default for all images of course, but add a BPSS fee if the user wants to store more than x KB of data. In theory, I could even implement this on all Peerhub powered sites like vigilante.tv (which has 1000's of videos and Millions of views) so that those mpeg files also get stored on Jackal, Walrus, Storj, etc.
By increasing the cost to the user, this also encourages users to scale and minify their uploads, a win-win for the front-end UX as well as the server admins.
"Lost images" wouldn't even be a thing anymore.
And how would this be implemented in a peerhub node? I remember that one of the things I gave up on was peerhub storage, it is not compatible with IPFS or other protocols. I have been looking for some ideas on how to implement these storages but my search has not been very satisfactory.
Our Peerhub software includes an option patch for peertube server. In this patch, we can include the integration with jackal, storj, walrus, etc.
Neither peertube servers, or our Peerhub software use IPFS at all. IPFS (as we proved years ago) is not suitable for real-time environments, especially streaming. We even re-wrote IPFS and many of its modules in C-lang just trying to speed it up, but IPFS is just not suitable.
For remote storage on some Peerhub powered sites, we currently use minio over s3 protocol which is lightning fast. We use https://agori.host for these kind of services. For streaming, we needed that level of power, attack resistance and low-latency.
Check out jackal, walrus and storj when you get a chance. If we can get a little bit of funding, I will setup a PoC for Blurt to jackal and run some benchtests to get us the proof we need. This would ultimately decentralise Blurt even more, as well as provide a better quality of service with lower latencies.
when you mention this, is the plugin in development? or is it some kind of private patch from you guys? as I mentioned I am a fan of peertube, however I could never figure out the storage issue a few years ago. Maybe with your enlightenment I can solve this riddle, thanks for responding.
It's a patch we continually develop as new advanced features are being added to our Peerhub software. See the descrip of the patch here:
https://peerhub.app/#install
As for distributed storage, we use minio over s3 with webmin and zabbix monitoring currently, but would really like to move up to ultimate file permanence and the elimination of the humans in the middle between master and slave nodes which jackal can provide. Jackal is available in the Cosmos (IBC) ecosystem of blockchains. Jackal's nodes are run by freedom loving experts too, not corporate types, which for me is very important in whom I work with.
exactly. It will be great to keep blurt BC small. But it should be possible to add additional layers out of main BC. Hive is huge because of games, hive engine and many more transactions in BC. It will fall in future because it will be too big to be decentralized. Maybe additional layer for blurt with lower transaction fees and with ex. smart contracts can be solution also for images.
Hey Saboin, if you get a chance, can you please join us in the Blurt chatroom on matrix?
Located here: https://matrix.to/#/#blurt:matrix.org
Before we start anything, I would really prefer to coordinate with you 💪