@system - My proposal to cut voat's hosting costs
(files.catbox.moe)https://files.catbox.moe/f9t09a.pngSo fyi, I'm a developer who just quit his job and actually has the free time to work on this and I am willing to. It would be a big change with lots of bugs to work out but if we pull it off it will massively reduce the number of requests going to voat's servers thereby cutting the hosting costs. In the process the underlying architecture of voat will be unique and more in line with the original vision of the internet.
Plan is instead of hitting the servers/database every time any user makes a request we funnel all of the server hits through "Chad" users who make periodic, intelligent, controlled requests. So these Chad's are basically acting like server proxies and it is they who serve the ordinary users. The ordinary users then serve each other the most recent reads in a mesh network, torrent, TCP/IP kind of thing.
Of course there will be bugs to work out and that's where we would need serious buy in from the voat users to do such a thing. We could make this code optional until the bugs are worked out but you know, it would still be a bumpy ride and everyone would have to be on board with this idea so they don't get pissed off when there are bugs.
So that's my proposal. I'm willing to work on it if ya'll like the idea. The mesh architecture is definitely cool and would make voat stand out compared to reddit, x, etc. who are still doing things in a very top down kind of way. Oh and of course, malicious Chad's and all that.
The other idea I have is simply to switch to Kubernetes so you can scale your server size depending on load. I mean maybe you already have a way of doing that but doing it in Kubernetes makes it more portable.
