FOSS gamedev and creative worlds

I was just thinking, what if a mod could be coded to load textures from web storage or image hosting sites instead of from the minetest server. Could provide faster connect times and lower server load since most minetest servers are locally hosted over residential internet.

So would this be possible or a good idea?

Good idea, but, what if the server also hosted the images, same load, but nice idea, I like it, and I would love to lower server load time.

It's a good idea. One of the first places I ran into this is with running CounterStrike servers and the "sv_downloadurl=" cvar that allowed the downloading of maps & files from a different web host than the actual server. It helped both the server playability and usually the webserver had better throughput for file hosting.

We already have the texture cache, which "remembers" textures when they are downloaded from a server.
The problem with it is currently that it is extremely inefficient when switching between servers with different texture packs, because the textures are stored by their file names, which, of course, often collide (which always happens between texture packs); but I have a little patchset against this inefficiency (feedback appreciated): http://repo.or.cz/w/minetest-c55/jn.git/shortlog/refs/heads/texturecache