• 0 Posts
  • 20 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 13th, 2023

help-circle










  • Realistically that single sent packet is going to get copied multiple times in order to re-route it just to the subscribers. We’re not all one one big LAN.

    What mechanism causes a single sent packet to get to all the subscribers (and only them)?

    Assuming that we all have a static IP for simplicity, a sent packet needs to be routed to the subscriber IPs (via their ISPs). Where is that table stored? Is it sent with each packet so that it can be routed on the way? That would be a huge bloat of the packet size.

    BTW, I do remember life before VCRs. Pre internet, I downloaded QWK packets from BBSs.

    I get the appeal of removing communication from the hands of FB etc, but I don’t see how switching to a broadcast system that increases unreliably would help. And I don’t see how the broadcast would work on the Internet that we have.


  • So when a video is created it is immediately sent to subscribers?

    In that case, for things to be sent once, it relies on the receivers always being online. That doesn’t work if my laptop is closed at the time.

    That’s why I’m thinking that it needs online caching to work. Or everyone has a cloud server that handles sending and receiving while they’re not online.

    In fact, that starts to sound like everyone running their own personal lemmy-like instance, to which their friends subscribe.

    And in that case it wouldn’t matter if messages were sent more than once, each person’s server would handle it.



  • I see I misunderstood how you mean this to work, that routing would handle sending data only to subscribers. I was imagining that it mean a simple LAN broadcast using a packet with the subnet bits all set (e.g. 192.168.255.255). I think that it’s more analogous to a mailing list distribution, but for general data/streams?

    But your earlier example of downloading the cat video still fails unless many people request the video at the same time (otherwise you’re multicasting to one). What happens if I watch the video on my phone while out, then watch it again on my laptop at home? It will still need sending twice.

    Wouldn’t a more efficient approach just be to have something like ipfs with lots of local caching?


  • I don’t see how that would work. So all my friends video streams, for instance, would be streaming data to all my devices as they are broadcast.

    But my laptop is currently asleep. It wouldn’t receive anything.

    How do you solve that without storing the video on a server that I can pull from on demand?

    Even for my devices that are on, they’d have to store everything as it was broadcast.

    And the streams (including every other broadcast) would constantly be eating up my bandwidth.

    How would I not receive streams that I’m not interested in? What would decide which broadcast packets do or don’t get sent to my router?