LibreServer Blog / Distributing Freedom

The point at which distributing Freedombone images from my own server started to become infeasible was probably reached some time ago. A couple of years ago I also tried using dat as a distribution method, because it's designed for large data sets. But my adoption of dat was premature, and it really wasn't up to the task - typically failing at NAT traversal. So now I've gone back to the older 2000s-era tech of bittorrent, and there are some magnet links via which disk images can be downloaded.

p2p distribution obviously is the way to go with this. It makes it relatively easy for others to re-seed the files and keep them available even if my server isn't. Some people have remarked that I should get a better server, but even if that was economically possible I don't think I'd want to go down that route. I'd much rather keep my own hardware minimal and cheap to run - possibly with low enough energy consumption that it could go solar at some point. I also as far as possible want to avoid utilizing "the cloud", aka corporate data centers. Running your autonomous systems from a centralized data center owned by the world's richest oligarch is not really consistent with a decentralization project.

A comical thought occurs that maybe for distributing large images snail mail might once again become viable. In the olden times people would ship GNU/Linux CDs in the mail. USB sticks are quite cheap and posting them might not be very expensive. But waiting a couple of days for bittorrent to sync is probably faster.