this post was submitted on 07 Apr 2025
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Massive deduplication across all accounts on all servers of image, audio, and video data would theoretically be possible, but ain't gonna happen. Or we could just discourage people from posting cat videos and bad memes (even less likely to happen).
Deduplication is trivial when applied at the block level, as long as the data is not encrypted, or is encrypted at rest by the storage system.
If the storage all belongs to one machine, yes. If it's spread across multiple machines with similar setups that share a LAN, then you need to put in a little thought to make sure that there's only one copy for all machines, but it's still doable.
In this case, we're talking millions of machines with different owners, OSs, network security setups, etc. that are only connected across the Internet. The logistics are enough to make a hardened sysadmin blanch.
I would argue that duplication of content is a feature, not a bug. It adds resilience, and is explicitly built into systems like CDNs, git, and blockchain (yes I know, blockchains suck at being useful, but nevertheless the point is that duplication of data is intentional and serves a purpose).
If the data has value, then yes, duplication is a good thing up to a point. The thesis is that only 10% of the data has value, though, and therefore duplicating the other 90% is a waste of resources.
The real problem is figuring out which 10% of the data has value, which may be more obvious in some cases than others.
Technically git is a blockchain