IPFS Media Support for Mastodon

While ActivityPub federates messages and accounts, media attachments of images, audio, video, and other file attachments don't move in the same way. This will initially focus on adding IPFS storage of media to the Mastodon / Hometown codebase, so that the fediverse all the way down to individuals can help share hosting of files as well as messages.

We're going to add IPFS support to Mastodon!

Roughly, this looks like this:

attachments are uploaded to the server
added to IPFS
they are replaced with a (configurable) link to an IPFS gateway
persisted by a gateway provider

Since storing files are already supported on S3, it's likely that the integration will happen in a similar way to that code.

We'll work with a variety of IPFS service providers to make this configurable ideally through the admin interface, so this might possibly be enabled at managed instances as well.

Fission will help architect, gather funds, and find developers to work on this feature. We'll deploy it on the PL network server plnetwork.xyz. The code will be under a permissive open source license to be able to be used by everyone!

We suggest monthly contributions as the best way to fund software that is maintained and supported over time.

Want to chat more about this? Rails engineer that feels like working on it? Mastodon instance admin who wants to learn more? Come join the Fission Discord server #ipfs4mastodon channel, or follow the #ipfs4mastodon tag on the fediverse.

Goal $500 CAD / mo.

Amount raised

$60.75 CAD / month

Still to contribute

$439.25 CAD / month