Now first storage space taken will be ridiculous, and then you will be hosting content you don't want to host because it could be straight up illegal in your country.
Look at any crypto-blockchain and count how many full-nodes vs thin-nodes are running in networks.
Then there is the whole tragedy of commons: average seed ratios and streaming video players for torrent content shows that are not willing to contribute to the greater good.
There is an option of dividing it between "publisher" (source) and "cachers" (caching whatever is recent and popular) but that only helps a little bit.
> Then there is the whole tragedy of commons: average seed ratios and streaming video players for torrent content shows that are not willing to contribute to the greater good.
Over 2 decades of pirating that has only been a problem for obscure and old stuff.
I don't see it being a problem in social network sense; you publish your stuff, if there is nobody wanting to look at it, seeds 1, leeches 0. Moment there is interest it propagates. It is of course problem if you want to see something archival that author is no longer in the network tho.
The Planetary app handles this much better, but it’s only on iOS/iPadOS ( therefore also able to run on M1 MacBooks) unfortunately.
It's a common problem for old stuff like you said, very new stuff with specific formats. It's an issue for new stuff because it often doesn't have enough starting seeds, and people leaving as soon as they're done watching/downloading doesn't help the situation. Before I've discovered usenet this was a very common issue for me.
Then there is specific file formats like chunky movie rips with Dolby Vision + Dolby Atmos + Dolby Yet Another Audio Format + all of that again in 5 languages. People will often choose a different release to download, and that leads to fewer seeds.
I know a group of people on a popular torrent tracker that just downloading everything and seed forever. They do entirely for free. Those petabytes will probably rot once they...die.
For a decentralized social network to be viable/sustainable (especially on the scale of something like Twitter), it has to be truly P2P, not federated on volunteer-run servers paid for through donations. That volunteer-run federated model is really only sustainable for smaller niche communities, not a global social network.
As of right now, the closest framework I can think of to handle something like this is a social network built on OrbitDB: https://github.com/orbitdb