I use FB because my family is on their.
My feed is almost entirely not my family, but “suggested” posts, and it made me realize I really hope something becomes popular to replace FB next and my family moves there.
What type of site do you hope becomes popular on the fediverse next?
I’d really like for PeerTube to take off, especially with how YouTube/Google seem to be escalating the war on adblockers.
Fun fact, video files are extremely big and cost money to host. It’s a neat idea but will never be scalable in the same way that YouTube is without some form of monetization
Funnily enough, I think federation is the only way anything is going to compete with YouTube. If the hosting costs are distributed across the network, it gets a bit more viable.
I could imagine a niche hobby focused instance funded by a patreon that hosts the videos of a few related creators. Perhaps the videos contain sponsorships which the hosting instance gets a cut of.
It would be even better if there was a BitTorrent style P2P sharing from others who have recently watched a video sharing it to other users. A bit tough from a browser, so perhaps in order to watch videos you need to sign up with (or simply just access via) a “viewer” instance that acts as a content cache and seed for other viewer instances.
You’d have a couple of network hops and p2p startup delays to contend with so perhaps the first 10-20s of a video are packaged as separate chunks that can be fetched directly from the source, or perhaps prefetched for subscribed channels on a given instance. I think you could fudge this as being more or less seamless with an HLS stream.
Viewer instances could fund themselves through the usual selection of options, and keep a cap on costs by limiting users. I could imagine a lot of people might self host viewer instances
Sorry that ended up as a bit of a brain dump
peertube already has the bittorrent thing, just not many people watch at the same time. it needs to be easier to seed videos you watch/like without leaving the browser window open
That was my thinking behind the viewer instances that do the seeding once the user has gone away from the browser. It also simplifies the client apps as they don’t have to try and set up p2p connections in random environments (imagine someone watching something on their phone via public WiFi)
You’re so right IMO!
I’m trying with a Lemmy art instance (we’ll see how that goes eh), and I host that on a PC, why couldn’t I have a bunch of art videos too? I think I can :-)
Of course, those “monetising” youtubers who “has to” “reach out” to millions of subscribers would need something else, but they won’t be missed by me anyway…
You - or someone like you - should totally make this happen.
I’m sorry but you’re completely out to lunch, YouTube is barely sustainable as it is and that’s without the inefficiency of distributed storage. There’s no way you can convince people to give up half their phone storage just to watch internet videos when ad-supported alternatives exist
peertube uses torrents
Yes, and torrents only work because they are relatively unpopular. You reach a certain scale and proportion of people who would rather just freeload than seed gets too big
i don’t think you understand how the torrenting works or why i raised it as a solution to the storage/bandwidth problem.
I do understand how torrenting works, it only works because the total amount of upload bandwidth being made available is enough to satisfy the demand for download bandwidth. As you get to larger and larger groups of users, the proportion of people willing to seed after their download finishes drops.
Also keep in mind that most ISPs give their users extremely low upload bandwidth relative to their download pipe, and you have an poorly scalable solution. At least if you’re talking anywhere within a few orders of magnitude of what YouTube handles.
peertube has everyone currently watching a video join the swarm. you just don’t seem to understand why we keep raising peertube and torrenting in the same sentence
Everyone currently watching the video will not have enough total upload bandwidth to support the download demand, especially when you move to resolutions higher than 1080
While I think the concept of BitTorrent to handle distributed storage is a good line of thinking, I have a feeling keeping seeders alive.
I kind of wish for Pied Piper from Silicon Valley. Distributed sharding with p2p distribution. I can only speak for myself, but my phone has more storage than I would ever need, and T-Mobile 5G is unlimited, just cache the video content as and my phone can serve chunks as a temp seeder until I need that space for new content. With enough people contributing the space needed per person could be negligible. Extending to a federated backend protocol, selfhosters to large organization could contribute block storage as things scale. BBC just started exploring Mastodon. If there was a viable video platform for BBC, their resources would help establish large collective pools of data.
Just keep it a completely open source standard, very strong encryption/compression and wide duplicated sharding across devices. I absolutely hate blockchain hype, but an actual use case would be a blockchain index of where each chunk of information resides.
All of that totally hypothetical, that’s just my “throw shit at the wall” idea for a federated solution. Initial adoption would probably never succeed. Just like in the show, things are getting to incredibly complex solutions once federated networks come into play, explaining it to not computer oriented people would be neigh impossible.
why peer to peer wouldn’t be scalable for this?
For not popular Videos you could have the same system as private trackers to encourage people to seed those videos.
Okay and? Like, you’ve listed the problem, which I think was already known to anyone passionate enough to care about PeerTube and to want it to grow, do you have any ideas or solutions or are you only here to demoralize and discourage?
They are escalating n paying customers too…
Imagine paying 15 bucks for something having their shit shoved up your ass without consent, audio is compressed junk. They turn off 4k randomly etc…
They don’t pay for any content really either just serving ads to plebs and booking profits… How are they not making money?
Honestly, the only thing about YouTube that pisses me off as a paying subscriber is that even though I pay for no ads…every fucking video has at least one “sponsor call-out” (aka: ad) that I have to manually skip.
Have you heard of SponsorBlock?
Doesn’t help my TV- and Phone-based watching.
This link is what you are looking for.
deleted by creator
Nah but see, that directly supports the creator making the content you’re watching… It’s annoying, yes, but at least you can skip over it immediately instead of having forced ads shoved in your face so Google can make an extra buck
Oh please I hope so.
It’s so frustrating how many youtube creators have to play stupid games just to make it so that their own subscribers see their videos. If I’m subscribed, I wanna see on my home screen when a new video is added by someone I’m subscribed too. I don’t wanna see clickbait_master_10,000’s newest video on there. Like there are so many content creators with millions of subs, who get no views because the aLgOrItHm decided people don’t wanna see their videos, even though all those people subbed to them.
I really want to see federated wiki system, just because of how awful Fandom is and the independent wikis are all super spread out.
Ditto. And this could work really well when coupled with Lemmy, as wikis often have a comments section, that Lemmy could provide them.
I would like to see a day where most websites, instead of having a “share to Twitter/Reddit” button, have a “Discuss this on our Lemmy community” button instead.
I really hate how interwiki navigation sucks on Fandom. Like, they’ve done all this branding and centralizing of the Fandom platform, yet I’m pretty sure they only fairly recently started logging you in on all wikis whenever you signed in on one.
Its all just to try and be some hip pop culture thing for use to “consoom” without any effort to actually take advantage of being a central platform for the repository of lore from across culture.
So imagine if you can sign in to one of the independent wiki and can edit/comment/link to copy on all federated pages.
So there doesn’t need to be a Nintendo wiki, but a federation of Zelda/Mario/Kirby etc.
(Yes I know Nintendo Independent Wiki Association is a thing, but it’ll be easier on them if they have software level federation.)
this would be cool, but I could see it causing issues for places like Memory Alpha, which have a really strict and well-defined manual of style and acceptable references. I frequently see things on other wikis that you’d never see on Wookiepedia, Tardis Data Core, and/or Memory Alpha, like fanart embedded in articles, links to YouTube videos, incomplete drafts without proper tagging, etc.
EDIT: Conversely I could really see it benefiting the smaller wikis, especially ones with lots of overlap with each other (all the various Marvel/DC wikis, the specific Clone Wars wiki separate from the main Star Wars one, etc)
I’m still hoping Lemmy becomes popular.
I mean I think it’s popular enough to be usable at least! Which is the biggest problem with new social media, all the features in the world mean nothing if there is a small user base.
Not sure if it counts but more BookWyrm style services like IMDb, Discogs, etc.
Pixelfed is working on stories which I’m really excited about. I love that kind of daily watch to catch up without posting on a feed that is always there. I think I’ve found myself hoping for a fully fleshed out discord replacement as well. Easy to manage servers with categories and channels, roles and permissions, etc.
Pixelfed was my answer too. I don’t do a lot of photo stuff, so I mostly stay on Mastodon/Lemmy, but the Dev is a really neat guy who seems like he needs to stay busy (have you heard of Sup yet?)
Pixelfed is the one i’m hoping for too. I follow a few people on there, but it would be nice if anyone I knew used it.
What app or apps can you use to access PixelFed?
I use the official app for no real reason other than thinking the dev is a cool person. Pixeldroid worked equally well.
My god I would love to have some version of facebook without suggested content.
For some reason whenever I go there these days to see what my family has posted, I’ll sometimes get 4 suggested content posts in a row. With recently them being like super anti vegetarian and anti electric vehicle.
As a vegetarian who uses electric vehicles, I know I’m silly, but I don’t need facebook reminding me all the time!
Bring back “sort by new” as well. No idea what they were thinking there. No I don’t need to see the same 3 top popular posts for a week straight.
There is an extension called “Social Fixer” that brings back the sort by new and allows you to filter out all the ‘sponsored’ and ‘suggested’ bullshit. It’s not being actively updated anymore, but it still works fine.
Wow thanks, I’ll have to look into that.
I was looking at Facebook the other day, first time in a while, and the amount of suggested content just in the feed is ridiculous. And my feed kept showing different stuff any time I reloaded, so I have no idea if I missed any updates from anyone I actually care about. It’s just so shit.
Non-stable content pisses me off. If I refresh the same URL in something like the same time period, I should get the exact same content.
Being unable to backtrack and end up where I was makes me anxious.
I know Mastodon is more like Twitter but, I feel like it could also replace much of Facebooks functions too?
Go to Feeds. You can even pin it directly to the navigation bar.
A solid equivalent to AskReddit would be nice. I know a lot have tried but they’re all too small at this point
A discogs replacement would be cool, or an etsy replacement that lets you list your wares for sale and take XMR/BTC, paypal, and all those cashapp things, etc.
I’m not really a fan of BTC becoming more wide spread. I’d prefer something more akin to GNU Taler.
Well then you don’t have to accept it, but it’s already widespread enough that it should be included, especially when privacy is less of a concern than buying drugs with XMR. I should note that the marketplace idea would be limited to legal items of course. Taler is cool, but not anonymous for both parties like XMR, I’m not saying don’t use it, but add it to the list rather than use Taler exclusively. No reason to not take multiple forms of payment and each “store” could choose what it accepts all the way from mailed cash to live chickens (figuratively, idk how that’d work logistically lol).
I should note that the marketplace idea would be limited to legal items of course.
How? There’s no way babysitting something like this to keep it to legal stuff wouldn’t be be a full-time multi-person job, and that’s before even starting to consider different legalities for different places.
I mean easy, if you see a listing for “heroin” on your instance, ban the acct, hell report their IP if you want. This isn’t alphabay, there are already better marketplaces for heroin. To your point, how does lemmy exist with CSAM, isn’t that a full time job?
So people selling drugs will just call them something that isn’t filtered or known to all the squares, just like they have done for decades on Craigslist.
It’s easy to say a marketplace app will be limited to legal stuff, but making that happen in reality is no simple prospect and federating it won’t make it any simpler.
Guess we need to shut down every marketplace ever IRL and online then.
A federated SoundCloud would be nice, especially SC became paywalled
There is Funkwhale that you can use for self-publishing music. You can also upload your music library privately to listen to remotely.
I would love to see funkwhale or another soundcloud fedi clone become more popular.
What is up with Facebook being soooooo bad like that. Its just constant suggested shit of shitty videos and ads.
I hate myself every time I open it. But I habitually do so due to dropping Reddit and this has annoyingly become my next dopamine hit.
Just go back to reddit at that point
i just want to see a bunch of random visualizers and shaders, generative art gifs blasted in my face like the old /r/woahdude
I actually wrote a prototype for an IPFS-based FB replacement. It… kinda worked. I could get posts to share some of the time, but I reached a point where I realized I’d need to rip out a bunch of my backend and start over to fix it and I just didn’t have it in me at that time.
Since then, however, a new IPFS framework has come out that’ll replace a lot of the crappy code I’d written for interfacing with IPFS. I’m thinking of blowing off the dust and trying again.
Friendica is 13 years old, but it takes a lot to get people to leave what they’re comfortable with.
I found Friendica to work well for one user, but as soon as you add more, you really need to scale up and it gets very expensive to host very fast. I also had this issue where Google would just block my server, so anyone with a gmail account couldn’t get their login info…
There are things I like about it, and as the Fediverse as a whole starts growing, I might just set up a single-use Friendica instance for myself, but be prepared for headaches if you want to get a “small” server for your family.
more integrated events with management, so many thing happen on facebook because of event fuctionality
Hey Rev! Long time no see, hope you’ve been doing well!
