Re:Farewell, Google Maps
by gregknicholson on Friday July 20, 2018 @06:28AM
(#17573823)
Would it be possible to put Free map tiles in something like DAT or IPFS, to share the load? Kind of like Peertube, but for maps.
[ Parent
| on HN ]
For sure, substack did this with peermaps + IPFS, check it out: https://peermaps.github.io/
Source: https://github.com/peermaps/peermaps
Also writeup about the architecture: https://github.com/digidem/osm-p2p-db/blob/master/doc/archit...
If you use vector tiles, and render them client side you could do this. For raster tiles, where you're storing images, there are too many images to do this practically.
And then you need to think of how to do data updates. OSM updates minutely.
Data updates are not required for many applications. You probably don't want to be google maps! For example I haven't updated the OSM data for more than a year and I don't think that there are any problems with the data being stale. It all depends on the application of course.
One major advantage of not updating your data very often is that the tile-images won't need to be re-generated thus you save a lot of (CPU intensive) resources! I think that another commenter mentioned that he generated the tiles in a CPU intensive system and then just off-loaded the images to not-so-fast system for serving.