It will also have a very low attention span and not know anything of substance.

Very detailed and helpful, thanks.

Ah, I posted above before I read your reply which basically said the same thing. I think this is a really cool idea (but probably doesn’t need blockchain to work).

There may be an opportunity here for Lemmy to help solve part of the distributed blob problem, that is, what are the incentives for people to contribute bandwidth/storage? Instead of the dodgy crypto-reward schemes we see come up, it could just be an extension to the motivations already driving why people set up Lemmy instances or contribute hours to moderate communities.

Some brain-droppings:

• I have a few TB that I would be willing to contribute if I knew how, if it wasn’t very time consuming, and if I was comfortable with what I was supporting.
• I don’t really want to serve videos unrelated to my personal interests or that I feel are low value, but I would be happy to serve content that is important to the communities that I am part of.
• Lemmy can be a proxy for automatically deciding what content is worth storing/serving for people contributing resources. Blob is posted to this community I’m supporting -> I’ll seed that. The post it belongs to has low interest or gets downvoted -> maybe that blob doesn’t need to stay around for that long.
• All the complexity of the blob swarm underlying a community really should be hidden from the clients. If it’s any more difficult than integrating an imgur-like service it’ll never be implemented.
• This could (should?) be implemented outside of Lemmy core.

This is interesting, I’ve never considered torrents for this exact case before. Has anyone done any groundwork to figure out what this would look like from a systems level? I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around the big picture - where the seeders come from, what are the incentives to keep certain kinds of data resilient, how to keep complexity away from the clients, etc.