Mastadon, Searx, Fediverse, and so on aren’t killing or replacing the sites they’re modeled after, not even close. They’re just providing a privacy focused alternative for those who don’t want to whored out by corporations or abused by powermods or shitty business decisions
No one said they are killing or replacing them , I moved to fediverse becuase the govt cant bully them into censoring certain content that was being removed from major SMs in my country
This response isn’t meant to be argumentative, I’m just learning:
Isn’t the fredieverse have the issue of being not very private at all? Aren’t our up votes public? Is our viewing history freely available to those that maintain an instance?
They’re private in the sense that there isn’t a corporation stealing your data without your knowledge, selling it without your consent, whoring you out for ads against your will, and/or making your experience shittier to manipulate you into buying their paid features. These alternatives offer a much more pure experience for the typical user. Things like comment and vote history being public is just a part of the design of the forum, they’re not tools to farm your data.
They could, but they’re pretty much guaranteed to not be as bad as the big corporations because they lack the resources and know how. The fact that you could also host your own instance is a huge plus considering that you could basically ensure that your data won’t get collected.
Even if you're self-hosting, you still have to send your data to any instance hosting posts or comments you're interacting with, otherwise you'll be the only person to ever see your own posts and comments.
No other instance will be guaranteed to have a complete profile of you, though.
Lemmy is basically just a decentralized clone of reddit. A public profile containing comments, posts, upvotes, and the like are considered an integral part of the Reddit experience. I personally don’t like it as a feature, but that’s why it exists.
Better to move them to something more private at the very least. Then we can slowly heal their addiction through in-app propaganda and purposefully declined algorithm performance over a long period of time.
NSFW, but redgifs is trying to be the xxx equivalent of TikTok. Redgifs is okay but there’s no app, someone could easily step in and take their model, make an app for clients, and decentralize it.
Once that takes off, encourage SFW content too in a separate section of the app.
That’s more bittorrent that federated, but maybe the metadata could be federated. It would share a lot of the same problems as bittorrents though: DMCA, prohibited content, content that’s no longer relevant enough to be available. So not only would the federated servers have to deal with requests from law enforcement and takedown notices, but so would ISPs and its users. Imagine not being able to host a federated server of it if you don’t run an algorithm that scan for infringing content. But besides that, yeah, maybe that would be plausible.
Thanks, I’ll check it out. I gave it a gloss, and what’s striking to me is that their FAQ doesn’t really mention what happens in case of copyright strikes or DMCA takedown notices.
Yeah, FB was killed by the younger people abandoning it for other SM. Twitter was killed by Musk. Reddit was killed by Spez.
And by “killed”, I mean “lost some users and content quality”. They still have millions of active users.
And my personal feed on Reddit is pretty much unchanged. Very few niche subreddits went into an extended blackout, so I still got all my content. And since I use the mobile website (FF+uBlock), the API change didn’t affect me that much. But I hope more communities from Reddit will move over here, especially the non-tech ones.
I think FB and Instagram should be considered seperated although both owned by Meta. Anecdotally the people around me aged 20-30 only ever use FB for local groups and marketplace but not in it’s original capacity.
Google isn’t concerned with their search engine right now. ABC is a mega tech conglomerate, the search engine is like a miniscule about to their revenue.
90% chance that if you use DuckDuckGo or Bing, it’s on a chromium browser, which means you very link have a Google account
I can recommend Kagi. Yes, it’ll cost you to use it (but not a lot, eg. I’m on the $10/month plan), but people expecting to get everything for free online is what got us into this mess in the first place.
people often forget that reddit initially achieved network effect because a small number of high quality users left digg for being too captured by corporate interests. the rest took 10 years to play out, but inevitably when the mainstream follows these initial users, the platform dies and it is time for another migration. I think we've been ready for a while.
Exactly. The users who have moved here are disproportionately commenters, power posters, and moderators from reddit. I was a top 1% poster on reddit, lots of OC, but I’ve essentially stopped participating there. I occasionally comment, but I don’t make posts on reddit anymore. If a significant fraction of power posters (and not just the reposters) and moderators migrate to lemmy, lemmy will have disproportionately good content, while the reddit experience will degrade further into reposts and poor moderation. I think lemmy already has disproportionately good posts and engagement, just still pretty small at the moment.
Yeah, I kinda agree. I like the niche, albiet small, community these decentralized platforms offer. TBH, I love the trade of brands not pointing their content firehoses in our direction. While I love the idea of more people using lemmy, for example, I worry about the inflection pointe where that changes and this place gets ruined.
Facebook is nowhere dead. Everyone I meet wants to chat via Messenger, small firms here don’t bother creating a website anymore, they create a facebook page (’ cause everyone’s there) and local/company communities use facebook groups to talk. Not to mention event hosts, they create fb events. If you are interested in topics that are liked globally, the fediverse is getting better. But if you are looking for a local community, you’ll rarely find any. The lemmy page of my country is basically dead, the sub however is thriving.
Youtube as others noted isnt as evil as reddit or others, but peertube could be a good augmentation to youtube which stores loads of data. However Internet Archive stores alot of data as does Wikipedia don’t know how though. You could also pay per video, one cent per video no subscription just own what you buy. Or you could find way of compressing video data consumption files like is done with png and obsidian files. Or merge ads with content but with a marketplace anyone who wants to sale a product can post to specilized instants for sales and only those who want to buy would be subscribed to for profit instances.
I think ads need to be the way to go for a peer video sharing platform , maybe less intrusive ads but they need to be there , else it will be very hard for many creators to make money
I didn’t know about this, thanks for the heads up!! But, with this decentralized approach, if a peertube node “dies”, could those videos be saved in a different node? I guess one of my biggest concerns with the fediverse is that fragmenting the network might also lead to fragility of content
Oof, that might be a solid roadblock limiting peertube/fediverse. Decentralization sounds great as a greediness deterrence system, but it also feels like lesser nodes will be more prone to stop maintenance over many years, making decentralize content more fragile than centralized. I wonder if a way to counterattack this is via enabling posts mirroring and content transfer among fediverse instances… 🤔
I get that point! But imagine “ancient youtube history videos” like “chocolate rain” were hosted on an old and unstable peertube node. I would find it sad that a decentralized infrastructure erased old and historic eras of the internet. I’m not saying this just defeats the whole fediverse, I just find it a point of concern, I’m sure if it is really a problem the developers and community will find approaches to mitigate it!
(Btw, I’m not yet well informed about all the caveats/tradeoffs/unwritten rules of lemmy/mastodon/peertube when it comes to data storage, so maybe what I’m saying just doesn’t make sense at all, correct me if I’m wrong!!)
So if every instance helps stream videos to a single client via a torrent protocol, that still means every instance needs to individually store all videos for all the servers it federates with. Sounds like it solves bandwidth as an issue but storage is still absolutely a problem.
Peertube already exist. If you have to upload a video to show someone on the internet it’s already more convenient than youtube as you don’t have to login and access with google accounts.
I frankly don’t see a way for federated video to happen unless uploads are severely limited or it’s paywalled. Even with YouTube’s wild compression, you’re looking at several gigs for a single 4k video.
Honestly the fact that YouTube exists is a miracle. Video is still just monstrously large.
I love nebula too. They’re definitely what I imagine federated video would be though. Restricted uploads, and paid. Nothing wrong with that though, video is expensive.
You can’t really have a federated payment provider, can you?
Not to sound like a crypto bro, but this is literally the biggest benefit of cryptocurrencies, easy transfer of money between people wallet to wallet, and you can choose your exchange to exchange the money between crypto and cash.
Unfortunately crypto bros absolutely ruined crypto for everything it could’ve been
I wonder when they’ll have to start deleting content to make space again. At some point, adding more and more servers probably won’t be feasible anymore.
It really is just wild that a service like YouTube is as big as it is and just does its thing.
Currently data storage is dirt cheap because globalised mass production of electronics is a wild thing.
As soon as we get past our current peak everything production at least on copper, rare metals, and petrol (there’s more, I’m just not knowledgeable enough) and we start to have to ration things a bit high res video streaming will be one of the first things to go.
And then comes the question, what will they delete first?
Probably old and therefore maybe irrelevant content, but those old videos from over a decade ago are also mostly lower resolution and bitrate and won’t free up as much space.
So once that’s exhausted, what goes next?
Who will have the privilege to stay on the platform, and who won’t? Or in other words, who makes YouTube the most money?
And once that has to be decided, content will be whatever YouTube wants it to be. Which I can’t imagine being a good thing.
Lbry does exactly this. Actually it works way better than the last time I checked it out. I’m guessing they have invested in a centralized storage solution because I’m encountering basically no missing videos and extremely fast playback which wasn’t the case the last time I checked them out a few years ago
I hadn’t dealt with video in years (like 2008) and recently used my Canon R6 to record a few seconds of 4k footage.
After getting over being annoyed at the camera stopping due to overheating after just 5 minutes, I was shocked to see a 7 second clip come to almost 700mb as a raw file.
Indeed video will probably be the last kind of network to see federation. It could take some pretty generous acts of philanthropy along the way to make anything sustainable happen.
100 GB ? that’s cute. I work in a film production company for advertisements, where the recent trend has been for the crew to return after 3-5 days of shooting, with RAIDs filled with somewhere between 15 and 25 TB of raw data. no fun to store all this.
I mean, that’s an extreme example. That’s way above what on even a 4K BR disc.
I think Netflix is like 6GB for a two hour movie 1080p which is more manageable, but my connection (at a whopping 6Mbps upload) would just about be able to host that for one other person to see.
Modern connections can do a lot, but it would have to be a large peer to peer solution to be back in the hands of the masses. A couple of Linux nerds with a spare server under their desk isn’t going to cut it. Realistically, popular videos would have to be on a CDN of some sort, and that ain’t particularly cheap at scale.
I’d happily pay for a federated video service tbh. I already pay for YouTube. I didn’t even blink when they raised the price on me because I get so much value out of it
I was actually thinking about what it would take to have a truly peer to peer video site. Have clients simultaneously consume, serve and transcode content. It would obviously be concentrated in the hands of big enthusiasts and small video companies, but presumably it would be similar to the fediverse where you can choose from many instances.
problem, the way I see it, is that there are wayyyyy more devices that cannot transcode and do not have the storage to maintain a cache, than ones that do. And the ones that can do so for a large number of clients are expensive to run. Much more expensive than stuff like lemmy. It’d be hard to form that kind of ecosystem.
It’s simple: don’t do 4K. It’s absolutely unneeded.
I’ve never seen any big media content that actually benefits from more than 720p. Among other things, for watching comfortably on laptops. Heck, for most communication / reaction videos, 540p / 480p is more than enough (in those cases the audio is actually more important than the visuals).
I watch a lot of music videos though so I love 4k. Don’t know why you’re getting down voted though. What you said is true. I don’t need to watch a talk stream vod in 4k
And still, do you need a 4K video stream for a music video?
I understand wanting higher res audio (which still amounts to minuscule amounts of bandwith compared to the video stream) but I don’t get how image quality is important in this setting.
Thanks. And it’s understandable, I’m guessing most of the people downvoting are the ones who are trying to defend their sunk cost after having bought into a solution without a problem.
That said, there do are valid use cases for stuff like 1080p or 4K (or for, say, >= 120 fps). I just don’t think modern “big corp” media, or TV shows, are good examples of it. Like, honestly, what do you want to watch Avengers: Endgame in 4K for? To salivate at the warts on The Hulk’s groin?
You’re right on that too. Those movies actually look worse in 4k because low resolutions hide the bad CGI.
I have a large collection of 4k blurays for my favorite movies though. Like Blade Runner 2049 and Dune look fantastic. But not every movie deserves the hard disk space.
I know there’s nothing wrong with those things, but the kind of people using the word “cancelling” and “free speech” are the kinds I try not to associate with
I dont see any source code, so I wouldn’t trust it, especially with the fact that you already mentioned two alternatives that are open source, that will fill the gap.
Not being open source is pretty damaging to their user acquisition, I guess. Well it did not ask for my personal info when creating an account, so I trusted it at first.
For now I use both Mastodon and Session, and still kept WireMin on my phone because it combines them both. I look forward to the day when they finally publish their source code.
It’s not open source, indeed. But I noticed that the users on WireMin are all very concerned about protecting their privacy. For example there’s one community created by one anonymous user: The Gray Papers- Take back your data. i.wiremin.com/invite/?g=k48934787653
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