I have been intrigued and excited by the potential applications of the Tahoe-LAFS filesystem since I learned about it a year or so ago. However, it seems that the filesystem has not really become popular as I expected it would. There is only one Android app for use with it, and the last update for that app was four years ago!
What are the short and long term plans for the use of Tahoe-LAFS in YunoHost? And what is the status of that development?
First of all, Tahoe-LAFS is not really efficient as a filesystem. In YunoHost we just wanted to use it as a backup technology, underlying a big public backup grid between lots of self-hosted servers (integrated into YunoHost, ArkOS and possibly other systems).
The thing is that Tahoe is using a bit too much resources (50MB RAM) as it is a large piece of Python code put in the RAM. Also, the software is not IPv6 compliant because of its extensive use of twisted, a Python network library not (yet) compatible ( https://twistedmatrix.com/trac/wiki/IPv6 ). Even with twisted made IPv6 compliant, I really doubt that Tahoe will work immediately after.
The plan is to remove it from YunoHost though. For now we are implementing local backup (i.e. on an external HDD) and “friend-to-friend” backup (i.e. helpers to use rsync between friend’s servers).
In a long term shot, the idea is to use a decentralized solution to create this tremendous public backup grid. Probably wrapped around torrent protocol and kademlia distributed hash tables.
Thanks for the detailed answer. That’s disappointing, though.