I have this weird idea for a distributed and private Mastodon instance:

- the instance would be Tor-only
- anybody* could help host an instance they like by installing and running some software (let's say a "node")
- the nodes would connect with each other and coordinate which one should do what (storage, database, http, etc)
- by using OnionBalance one can split the traffic among all the "http" instances

*not really "anybody" because this would make it trivial to take down the instance

@pete @afilini It was very nonperformant last time I played with it.

@pete @afilini Patchwork on desktop. Every time I wanted to see what's up in the neighbourhood my laptop started huffing and puffing like it was trying to crunch through the post-segwit blockchain.

@kekcoin @afilini Ah, so specifically high cpu usage? I could believe that: Scuttlebutt is blockchain based, er, hashed linked list based. :)

@pete @afilini Also lot of "this content is missing because it is outside of your network" notices in place of replies, seeing replies to nonexistent threads (without option to request them from the network), etc.

This place also doesn't show/know about everything, but at least if you want to get a full(er) view of a thread or profile you can view it on its "native" instance.

@kekcoin @afilini yup. That issue can be reduced if you are connected to more distribution servers. But overall I think for public social networking they could do better with having mastodon like URL lookups as a backup to their P2P scheme.

@pete @afilini That, or a combination approach of automatically connecting to servers that do have whatever content that can't be displayed, and lazyloading to take away the delay between starting up the application and being able to start browsing content. Load the stuff that I follow or tags I have favorited or whatever first, populate the reply threads second and then (optionally) load more content for me to discover.

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