I want to be part of a flat collective/network of folks / orgs working together to provide resilient e2ee data storage using free software.

Like a file backup / object storage federation of sorts.

I want it to be scalable, i.e. folks and orgs who have spare storage capacity can contribute this capacity to the collective, effectively increasing the collective's total storage capacity. The collective should gracefully handle nodes dropping off or quitting the collective, and re-joining.

The API should be well-known, preferably something like S3, so the collective/network easily integrates as a backend for existing software.

I think there should be some way to 'balance the books' so to speak, to avoid selfish behavior like a participant providing 3GiB of storage and using 3TiB.

The balancing can be in-software, e.g. each participant gets an identity which the software uses to identify how much the participant contributes and utilizes across all their nodes.

The balancing can also be out-of software, through a member system or similar.

Would be nice with a social aspect.

Is there already something like this?

What software would be good for building something like this?

@deuxfleurs would #garage fit this use case?
If I understand correctly, Garage can scale to many nodes in many locations/zones, but 3-4 zones (one of which can be a hot spare) is recommended. If a garage cluster consists of 50 zones with 150 nodes total, will chunks be spread across zones in a way that isn't limited by low-capacity zones? Does the total storage capacity of the cluster depend on whichever location has the least capacity?

Another option I found earlier is @peergos, but I'm fairly lacking in knowledge about the project. Being p2p, would that fit this use case better?

#techCollective #democracy #privacy #digitalIndependence #e2ee #anarchism #p2p