Of course! Feel free to send me an email if you'd like to grab virtual coffee and talk more. I'm evan [at] strangemood [dot] org.
> I'm a but confused here on the ownership - if its the purchaser or the seller who is in control. Filecoin isn't free so i assume one of these groups has to be footing the bill.
Ah! This is what DAOs are for.
A percentage of every sale goes to a community treasury (a wallet). That wallet is collectively controlled by a token. That token is minted to sellers upon purchase, so the sellers control the treasury.
The treasury acts as a "payer of last resort". It pays for Filecoin deals basically. It also can pay maintainers of open source tooling through decentralized Quadratic funding grants (see https://wtfisqf.com/).
Rebase (the company that makes Strangemood) peer's the store's small-file metadata (titles, descriptions, etc) as an additional backup. We don't have to do this, but it costs us about $0.15 per year to do so, and it makes the network faster and safer.
Realistically, DAOs might be a janky solution. I'd love to see payment of file store be included within the protocol itself.
But there's a few quirks of Solana that made this difficult. Specifically, you can't use more than 1024 bytes in a single instruction, which limits the scope of the program. This might be fixed in the future though.
> In Strangemood's case, we make a decentralized marketplace for software licenses, that's owned primarily by the sellers (ie: decentralized Steam). If Strangemood stored files on S3, then whoever owns the the AWS account is the only operator, and so the product is a traditional service, rather than an asset.
I'm a but confused here on the ownership - if its the purchaser or the seller who is in control. Filecoin isn't free so i assume one of these groups has to be footing the bill.
Wouldn't this goal be equally served by just hosting it in the sellers s3 bucket (or webserver, or torrent, etc)? Someone still has to pay for and be in control of the filecoin "instance" (probably not the right word), what's the difference between that person doing that vs running their own server.