Can Lemmy be used to actually share files?

planish@sh.itjust.works to Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ@lemmy.dbzer0.com – 22 points –

Obviously it wouldn't be allowed in this community, but how feasible would it be to make a community on a friendly instance and start shipping data through it somehow? If it works for NNTP it ought to work for ActivityPub, right?

Potential problems:

  1. Community full of base64'd posts immediately gets blocked by everybody's home instance.
  2. Community host immediately gets sued for handing out data it might not have a license for.
  3. Other instances that carry the community immediately get sued (see #2).
  4. Community host is in the US and follows DMCA and deletes all the posts that are complained about.

Maybe it would work as a way to distribute NZBs or other things that are useful but not themselves copyrightable? But the problem with NZBs is you have to keep them away from the people who want to send DMCAs to the Usenet providers about them, or they stop working. So shipping them around in a basically public protocol like ActivityPub would not be good for them.

16

Not really to be honest. ActivityPub is a very inefficient protocol. My concerns are that it is HTTP based and that the files would need to be replicated across every federated instance. There are already scaling issues just from having to federate all the text.

You need a method that will be secure between two people, and no hassle from third parties?

I love this dear high sea rider

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Now if the text of your message is used as the PassLoc password and the image is a size Lemmy wont shrink

then the full image is your eyes only.

Which would be great if I remembered what I sent XD

This is why we have failed our great fore-bearers, the cypherpunks.

i like the idea, but the public nature of the protocol makes me think it might not be plausible. any concerned parties have full access to those communications. it would be a constant game of cat and mouse, and god forbid they take aim on an instance owner. it could set precedent.

Well, not directly directly, but last time I checked you were allowed to share magnet links on here.