The creator of Newgrounds has considered adding ActivityPub support to join the fediverse but is worried it would make their hosting fees untenable by “serving files to millions of people on third party apps“. Can anyone with more knowledge on how this works help them?
https://www.newgrounds.com/bbs/topic/1537550/3#bbspost27933331_post_text
Having Newgrounds on the Fediverse would be incredible. Newgrounds has a huge art community, many features not available on any platform and has been around the longest (1999)
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Various services have the capability to fetch and copy hosted content (Mastodon, Lemmy, many more) but that capability is often restricted for larger files because those free servers don’t want to pay the massive bill for hosting video. I bet it’s also why Bluesky only recently added video support.
The problem isn’t necessarily the federated hosting, but picking who pays the bill. Everyone wants to host fancy text messages, but nobody wants to pay for large files.
That makes total sense. And I would guess decentralized hosting or federated hosting couldn’t meet this need?
It probably would, but if you federate hosting, you’ll need to agree on things like “what file size is acceptable” and “who pays when a scraper fetches terabytes of data in a day”.
Even with something like torrents or IPFS, someone needs to sacrifice storage and bandwidth to keep every file around. I don’t know of any good federated hosting solutions that would provide an experience acceptable to someone scrolling through a feed. The closest I can think of is one of those web3 scams, but that’d add the difficulty of variable storage costs (and inviting cryptocurrency traders).