Copy‐And‐Share Mirrors

⸺ by Charles Iliya Krempeaux

⸺ published 2022-05-05T23:47:34-07:00

It used to be common for people to copy one, or more, or even all the files from another (FTP, HTTP, or whatever) site, and share it with others.

The original site even considered this helpful!

These copy-and-share sites were called — mirrors.

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Back then, when people wanted to download a giant file, many people would find the mirror that was fastest for them to download from.

(Back then, this often meant picking a mirror that was geographically close to you.)

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Mirrors were solutions to a number of problems.

But — a couple of the problems mirrors solved was —

№1: finding somewhere, anywhere!, you could download the file you want from, and

№2: (of the places you could download it from) picking a “best” place for you to download it from.

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Nowadays, I think content-distribution-networks (CDN), and BitTorrent also address some of the issues that these Mirrors addressed.

Although one can think of CDNs and BitTorrent as types of mirroring.

(You can also probably throw Gnutella in there too. It can also be thought of as a mirroring technology. Gnutella was very very popular at one time — but it came and went.)

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I think if you want a “good” decentralized Internet, federated Internet, distributed Internet, P2P Internet, or whatever you want to call it —

You need mirrors, and you need mirroring.

Also, mirroring is easier & even “better” in many ways if you utilize content-addressing.