Libp2p or similar stack could be used to provide the phone instance an address, caching could be distributed among peers. Of course, as long as other servers also support libp2p.

What would be the up/downsides?

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[–] PrincipleOfCharity@0v0.social 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Now I think I see what you are saying. People have suggested that Lemmy needs a separate protocol to connect with other Lemmy instances to more efficiently synchronize. Gossipsub could do that. It would also be nice if each Lemmy instance only needed to keep a minimal amount of data at any one time to service the clients that connect to it while the rest exists in the swarm.

I still don’t think that you would want a phone to function as your server and your client, though. All that coordinating takes bandwidth and processing power. Phones are ill-equipped for that. Also, usually to p2p effectively you need to be able to make direct connections through firewalls. Opening your phone directly to the Internet would be a bad idea, plus I doubt any phone companies would let you do that. Without a direct connection, you would need to proxy your connection through some server somewhere and deal with bandwidth costs. Might as well just connect to a server as a client.

Maybe the final solution is software like Lemmy running with decentralized identities via the Nostr protocol that is federated out using Gossipsub.