Helping Via Resource Sharing?

[sahin52]

Is there a way to help the activity pub projects by resource sharing? For example I know peertube requires a lot of resource, because it contains videos, similarly loops.video or any other project.
I can host the videos in my local, or share in any way. I don't have cash to share with these projects but I can share my laptop as a server.
So, is there a way to do this? I know relying on random people might not be a good idea, but there can be a backup server, while the resources are shared via these hosts initially.

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[evanp]

Hey, @sahin52 , this is a really helpful offer. Right now, there's not an easy way to do this. There are some neat peer-to-peer services for sharing disk space and network bandwidth, like IPFS. However, unless the server software supports the disk-sharing service, it won't be helping.

I'm going to switch into talking about it from the ActivityPub spec side, which might not be interesting to you. Feel free to bail out here!

For ActivityPub, we represent a video as a Video object. One thing a server could do with public data is upload it to IPFS, give it a permanent name with IPNS, and then use that as an alternate URL in the url property of the video object.

{
    "@context": "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams",
    "id": "https://social.example/video/1",
    "type": "Video",
    "name": "Me solving the Rubik's Cube",
    "attributedTo": "https://social.example/user/evanp",
    "to": "as:Public",
    "url": [
        {
            "href": "https://dn710607.ca.archive.org/0/items/evanp_rubikscube_1/VID_20180714_115633479_HDR.mp4",
            "mediaType": "video/mp4",
            "name": "Default HTTPS link for most users",
            "type": "Link"
        },
       {
            "href": "ipns://k51qzi5uqu5dk8ltw3at1kc494qbkgtebvwts1d8mkob1jew5saidobmnk4k7j",
            "mediaType": "video/mp4",
            "name": "IPNS link for users who want to reduce load on the server",
            "type": "Link"
        }
    ]
}

Clients and servers that see the IPNS URL could use it instead, lowering the network bandwidth demands for the web server.