I got super stoned thinking about how much wasted data (storage, traffic) occurs from sharing memes.

For example: the same meme may be hosted in a thousand places.

Multiply that by billions of images and videos.

Sometimes I think about this.

Im old enough to remember when reddit didnt have image access and you had to click the link to go to the other resource. like imgr and such. It acutally forced traffic onto other websites. It wasnt a bad thing to simplify the process, but eventually reddit started...owning the content. Like even images were "owned" by the algorithm. Which had copyright strikes etc..etc...

Now we on the fedi are capable of directly posting from other platforms and interacting with them. Feels nice.

Some direct links:

@aurynn@cloudisland.nz

https://cloudisland.nz/@aurynn/117138241973438488

May your grainy memes be good my friend.

I think at that point the term is liberate.

Back around 2010 the peoples over at Google did some math and figured out that if you took all of the electrons used for online data it would weigh about as much as a strawberry. I’ve always wondered how much that has changed.

Wasted? That's the blood and soul of the internet your talking about.

Imagine if each meme was hosted in a single place. Can't share a specific meme because the server is down.

When humanity dies and the dog-sized, plastic-guzzling tentacle insects take over in a few millenia, they'll find goatsee on hard drives all over the world.

Huh, I coulda sworn that was porn

Fascinating. Small if true. Do you have a source?

I'm not sharing the exact same meme as others, I add my own layer of deep-fried jpeg compression to it, as it has been a tradition since ancient times.

Here you go. I misremembered slightly, it was VSauce who made the calculation based on earlier calculations and data from Google and others.

That's a different essential body fluid.

Altough people AI generate the meme from scratch to save time of googling and downloading the image nowadays. All 7 seconds of it.

NFTs?

I think these social media providers have an algorithm that can encode the screenshot from the other social media and reconstruct it on demand.

They are doing the former for data-mining anyway. So why not do the reverse to save on stotage?

We must be up to the weight of a watermelon by now.

Oh no.

I have a vision of a dark future, in which we replace the jpeg compression deep-fryer with an AI-Telestrations deep-fryer.

Oh that's cool, thanks for digging it up.

You misspelled "decades" as "millenia" btw.

Fun fact: A NFT is only guaranteeing a URL to an image, because the image data would take too much space on the blockchain. There is no guarantee this URL stays up or even stays the same, or that the image data is unique for that matter.

and what are you doing in the 10 minute breaks in between?

This was my favorite fun fact to point out during the NFT hype. Even skeptics would derisively say "you're buying a jpeg" and I would always say "Ackhually, not even that!"

That’s super wasteful but lets be fair google search is absolute rubbish for finding that one meme you half remember.

The federation protocol is HTOF. It stands for Having Terminally Online Friends.

Although ostensibly that's not so much a bug as a feature - so that whenever one goes down, its content remains elsewhere.

That thought will need revisiting as we get larger though, imho. Like many "downstream" instances could set their own chosen expiration dates as they receive content from the more "primary" ones... or sth.

stop pussyfootng around and just share a prompt that goes to a diffusion model to generate it fresh for every view

IPFS, it would be deadly slow.

Let's make a DHT meme service where everyone can share the meme torrent and you can just extract the single mem you want out of a multi-terabyte archive.

The Lemmy devs primarily make software that they want to have working on their home instance, Lemmy.ml. How that federates outwards to other instances, something more desirable to the Western world, is a much lower priority. Which is still quite generous to offer as FOSS to the entire world.

An instance admin can choose to immortalize content if they want, but it happens so very rarely that it's probably not worth automating.