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distributing freedom

The point at which distributing Freedombone [1] 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 [2] 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 [3] 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.

[1] Freedombone

[2] dat

[3] magnet links