If there won’t be a one “default” place for laypeople to go to, the project won’t catch on.

Bluesky got popular because they had this place. Pixelfed got somewhat popular because they maintained a “central” instance. Matrix had matrix.org.

PeerTube, Lemmy and most of the Fediverse are niche geek places because they have many equally poorly-funded instances.

What’s B.O.?

No punchline, just found such hardline requirements potentially entertaining.

As $RANDOM returns 0 to 32767, chance of the command running is not 1 to 5, but 1 to 5.00018311665.

Not required on BusyBox-based systems, a.k.a. Alpine.

Who the hell uses WhatsApp for comms in IT?

That’s median.

Encryption

Troublesome; can’t be automated.

Well, the internet runs on encryption. If the algorithm behind HTTPS is cracked, no conventional data storage service is safe. Overall I’m quite confident modern post-quantum encryption is quite secure for the task.

As for the legal staff, well, PeerTube works the same by sending arbitrary content through your device and no one got in trouble.

That was one way I was thinking to handle this. As I don’t have friends, I had to think of some other ones.

One way to confirm participation is to require participants to regularly calculate and send to other hosts hashes of stored chunks + random strings that were generated by the chunk owner in advance and were unknown to the peer before a given point in time. They would confirm to the network they still have the file daily, if they won’t verify it for 14 days other peers would be liberated from an obligation to store files they uploaded.

“Sub-lemmys” are called “communities”.

Yeah, it’s one of the least stable ones sadly. https://lestat.org/

What country and why?