3 ms·

I remember thinking about a similar concept a few years back. It would be good to have a p2p archive of human knowledge for end of the world scenarios. The pro

I remember thinking about a similar concept a few years back. It would be good to have a p2p archive of human knowledge for end of the world scenarios. The problem is Bittorrent isn't the protocol for it, it doesn't allow incremental changes. You also don't want the complete history like git, you want something that passes a diff around. It would be great to have a p2p network with Wikipedia, a load of academic papers, maps and recipes, which anybody with a computer could contribute drive space to storing.

markovbling 10y ago
The database dumps are surprisingly small - can store the whole thing on 2 TB hard drive incl media - or 64GB SD card if you just want the SQL database with text and metadata
- qznc 10y ago
  If you factor in the overhead of p2p, it is probably cheaper, if operating systems come with a few hundred MB of the more popular Wikipedia pages.
markovbling 10y ago
The database dumps are surprisingly small - can store the whole thing on 2 TB hard drive incl media - or 64GB SD card if you just want the SQL database with text and metadata
kem 10y ago
I agree with your last statement, and think this is a great proof-of-concept for distributed networking. I worry, though, that this space is fracturing in a way that's hampering adoption. Between Freenet, Zeronet, IFPS, I2P, not to mention things like Retroshare, Matrix, and so forth, there's a lot of redundancy but with important differences between any given two solutions. I'm not sure what can be done about it, but it seems like something in this area needs a network effect to accelerate adoption, but to do that, it needs to be comprehensive in what it offers while also being sufficiently differentiable from other projects. It's great to see so much going on in this area, but it's getting difficult to know what does what, and where one might put some resources.
diegorbaquero 10y ago
There's a BEP (46 iirc) proposed for that :)

markovbling 10y ago

The database dumps are surprisingly small - can store the whole thing on 2 TB hard drive incl media - or 64GB SD card if you just want the SQL database with text and metadata

qznc 10y ago
If you factor in the overhead of p2p, it is probably cheaper, if operating systems come with a few hundred MB of the more popular Wikipedia pages.

markovbling 10y ago

The database dumps are surprisingly small - can store the whole thing on 2 TB hard drive incl media - or 64GB SD card if you just want the SQL database with text and metadata

kem 10y ago

I agree with your last statement, and think this is a great proof-of-concept for distributed networking. I worry, though, that this space is fracturing in a way that's hampering adoption. Between Freenet, Zeronet, IFPS, I2P, not to mention things like Retroshare, Matrix, and so forth, there's a lot of redundancy but with important differences between any given two solutions. I'm not sure what can be done about it, but it seems like something in this area needs a network effect to accelerate adoption, but to do that, it needs to be comprehensive in what it offers while also being sufficiently differentiable from other projects. It's great to see so much going on in this area, but it's getting difficult to know what does what, and where one might put some resources.

diegorbaquero 10y ago

There's a BEP (46 iirc) proposed for that :)