You pay someone else to host it for you. (Instanced social media)
You trade your digital freedom, privacy and political stability of your country to someone else to host it for you. (Meta, X, TikTok)
3 hasn’t been working out so far and people really don’t want to have to pay another subscription. So you can spend your battery life and data instead. Maybe setup the service so that other people can seed on your behalf, so you could use your own resources or pay for someone elses all in the same ecosystem.
Peertube does a similar thing, using bittorrent to share the load, but it only works while you’re actively watching the video so outside of very popular videos it is usually just the instance who is providing bandwidth. By tying the data sharing directly into the primary interaction method it creates a much larger pool of peers and, eventually, once everyone stops seeding it the data stops existing.
No permanent record of everything you’ve ever posted, no central repository of data to be hoovered up by the AI startup who pays off the instance owner, no empowering a single person to control all of social media for their own selfish ends.
I am aware of the problems and have had similar thoughts about how best to deal with the taxing reality of streamed video, but I think the reality of it is, while already fighting the network effect and ad budgets, someone that downloads an app and see it saps half their battery for that day because they liked 5 videos and left, they are going to uninstall it.
I think instanced makes the most sense, and even that would be a hard ask if popularity every spikes.
I think the fact that Peertube which I think of as more a PC interface, where bandwidth and power consumption are less an issue, but still chooses to limit the peer connections to active watching speaks to how discordant the idea is with what people expect from streaming media.
I would happily use a desktop app as you described, so if it ever exists, let me know 😁
I am aware of the problems and have had similar thoughts about how best to deal with the taxing reality of streamed video, but I think the reality of it is, while already fighting the network effect and ad budgets, someone that downloads an app and see it saps half their battery for that day because they liked 5 videos and left, they are going to uninstall it.
The tech is already most of the way there.
Consider this.
There is already a type of community that has developed sets of rules and incentive structures such that they have created a distributed service with petabytes of storage for content and gigabits of excess bandwidth for delivery.
This service is in such demand that people will voluntarily study for and take a test (waiting hours in line for their 1 on 1 interview/test). This is in addition to their buying/renting their own storage and bandwidth and adding it to the pool that comprises this service. Much more work than plugging a phone in to charge!
What I’m describing is a private bittorrent tracker community.
They’ve created a scalable, peer to peer, media storage and retrieval service (for public domain videos and music, which are the best) where you’re required to contribute AT LEAST as much as you take (1.0 share ratio).
In addition, by publicly displaying the upload/download statistics about a user’s account it has turned into a source of social credit. People seed massively in excess of what they will every download in order to have the highest ratio. The social systems and norms are aligned with the good of the service.
People love the high ratio people, after all everyone loves downloading a 85GB 4k HDR+ copy of It’s a Wonderful Life at 15gbps, that’s only possible because Joe Ratio has a seedbox on a 50Gb connection serving up classic movies(super classic and old) for clout.
You don’t even have to worry about having movies downloaded in advance when you can just have your seedbox grab your favorite Charlie Chaplain movie and have it available for streaming directly from the seedbox in less time than it takes to grab a glass of water.
Take the model of a public tracker and create a decentralized messaging system around it (I think there is one or two projects like that already floating around but the names escape me). Bittorrent already has a distributed hash table (DHT) service which can completely replace a centrally hosted tracker or run along-side hosted trackers.
You are also right that it would have to be easy, but that’s possible. Signal has some of the most advanced encryption systems available but to the average user it’s just text messaging. There are some talented frontend developers and UX designers out there but that’s not my lane and I have confidence in them.
I am aware of private trackers. I guess to me, even in the space of “it’s neat to think about” something like Loops and built on activity pub makes more sense.
Now if we imagined folks offering home hardware or ‘seed boxes’ to help an instance out, that I could see being useful tech, but constantly uploading from your phone seems a bit silly.
You could probalby make it as simple as plug it in and scan the QR code on your phone to pair it to your account, give it your wifi password or ethernet cable and it’s sitting there donating a little bandwidth to the swarm and earning a ‘I’m seeding rn’-kind of badge (people love gamification and cosmetics).
I don’t see any other choices other than:
3 hasn’t been working out so far and people really don’t want to have to pay another subscription. So you can spend your battery life and data instead. Maybe setup the service so that other people can seed on your behalf, so you could use your own resources or pay for someone elses all in the same ecosystem.
Peertube does a similar thing, using bittorrent to share the load, but it only works while you’re actively watching the video so outside of very popular videos it is usually just the instance who is providing bandwidth. By tying the data sharing directly into the primary interaction method it creates a much larger pool of peers and, eventually, once everyone stops seeding it the data stops existing.
No permanent record of everything you’ve ever posted, no central repository of data to be hoovered up by the AI startup who pays off the instance owner, no empowering a single person to control all of social media for their own selfish ends.
I am aware of the problems and have had similar thoughts about how best to deal with the taxing reality of streamed video, but I think the reality of it is, while already fighting the network effect and ad budgets, someone that downloads an app and see it saps half their battery for that day because they liked 5 videos and left, they are going to uninstall it.
I think instanced makes the most sense, and even that would be a hard ask if popularity every spikes.
I think the fact that Peertube which I think of as more a PC interface, where bandwidth and power consumption are less an issue, but still chooses to limit the peer connections to active watching speaks to how discordant the idea is with what people expect from streaming media.
I would happily use a desktop app as you described, so if it ever exists, let me know 😁
The tech is already most of the way there.
Consider this.
There is already a type of community that has developed sets of rules and incentive structures such that they have created a distributed service with petabytes of storage for content and gigabits of excess bandwidth for delivery.
This service is in such demand that people will voluntarily study for and take a test (waiting hours in line for their 1 on 1 interview/test). This is in addition to their buying/renting their own storage and bandwidth and adding it to the pool that comprises this service. Much more work than plugging a phone in to charge!
What I’m describing is a private bittorrent tracker community.
They’ve created a scalable, peer to peer, media storage and retrieval service (for public domain videos and music, which are the best) where you’re required to contribute AT LEAST as much as you take (1.0 share ratio).
In addition, by publicly displaying the upload/download statistics about a user’s account it has turned into a source of social credit. People seed massively in excess of what they will every download in order to have the highest ratio. The social systems and norms are aligned with the good of the service.
People love the high ratio people, after all everyone loves downloading a 85GB 4k HDR+ copy of It’s a Wonderful Life at 15gbps, that’s only possible because Joe Ratio has a seedbox on a 50Gb connection serving up classic movies(super classic and old) for clout.
You don’t even have to worry about having movies downloaded in advance when you can just have your seedbox grab your favorite Charlie Chaplain movie and have it available for streaming directly from the seedbox in less time than it takes to grab a glass of water.
Take the model of a public tracker and create a decentralized messaging system around it (I think there is one or two projects like that already floating around but the names escape me). Bittorrent already has a distributed hash table (DHT) service which can completely replace a centrally hosted tracker or run along-side hosted trackers.
You are also right that it would have to be easy, but that’s possible. Signal has some of the most advanced encryption systems available but to the average user it’s just text messaging. There are some talented frontend developers and UX designers out there but that’s not my lane and I have confidence in them.
It’s a neat idea to think about, at least
I am aware of private trackers. I guess to me, even in the space of “it’s neat to think about” something like Loops and built on activity pub makes more sense.
Now if we imagined folks offering home hardware or ‘seed boxes’ to help an instance out, that I could see being useful tech, but constantly uploading from your phone seems a bit silly.
I like the home hardware seedbox idea.
You could probalby make it as simple as plug it in and scan the QR code on your phone to pair it to your account, give it your wifi password or ethernet cable and it’s sitting there donating a little bandwidth to the swarm and earning a ‘I’m seeding rn’-kind of badge (people love gamification and cosmetics).
Good brainstorming, was fun o7