jonny (good kind) on Nostr: Ik im preaching to the choir on here, but I do genuinely get the pushback from ...

Ik im preaching to the choir on here, but I do genuinely get the pushback from cloudbrained ppl that "we don't need #p2p data infra because Amazon is giving it to us for free rn, and if they stop the NIH would step in because they dont want to lose all the data"

Whelp, an enormous set of 12 databases of pathogen data just went *poof* when the funding dried up. The only way they are able to bring back a temporary static copy is because other foundations and universities stepped in, but aside from the death of the active databases, how long will that last?

P2P data infrastructure is not some radical pie in the sky Pipedream. It is ***the only means for making sustainable nonprofit repositories of scientific data.*** It's open data that's the pipedream without P2P.

Not only can it be done in a way thats compatible with existing cloud infrastructure, it would be *strictly additive* to its capacity, and in the case that funding dries up, can continue to exist as long as it is useful to the people affected, who can combine whatever storage and bandwidth resources they have.

The alternative of continuously needing to recreate databases, catastrophic loss, and eventually the NIH becoming totally beholden to paying increasing fractions of its tiny budget to AWS spells a grim, grim future for open data.

I've written about this before, and am working on it, but every time this happens my Cassandra complex grows greater: https://jon-e.net/infrastructure/#peer-to-peer-as-a-backbone

The db in question: https://veupathdb.org/

#VectorBase #VEUPathDB #OpenData #OpenScience