Another great article from 404 Media highlighting the power that the tech giants have amassed over how how we use the internet.
This brings me, I think, to the elephant in the room, which is the fact that Google has its hands on quite literally every aspect of this entire saga as a vertically integrated adtech giant.
This extreme power over the adtech and online advertising ecosystem is one of the subjects of an FTC antitrust suit against Google.
Cool, I like that idea unironically. So how are you going to do that? To accept only “quality uploads” you would have to somehow know, ahead of time if the uploaded content is acceptable. Sure maybe you have a white list but have fun maintaining that.
Okay so different idea maybe you let people vote on the video somehow and delete videos that are deemed poor quality. Great! So now you burn through writes instead of storage itself which is probably desirable though it only lessens the need for more drives. There’s a flaw in this system though. How do you prevent a community from removing a video that’s been voted to be poor quality (IE fake “bad” reviews)? Are these videos gonna be manually reviewed? Manually reviewing would have the same immense maintenance problems as a whitelist so again have fun maintaining that.
And who pays the creators? They are usually partly or mostly ad supported. At best they have a patreon/floatplane or other support platform.
They will simply not come over since there’s no audience. No audience, no creator. No creator, no audience.
Just like nobody would leave reddit for Lemmy since all the content is on reddit?
To be honest, I miss the times when people made videos because they wanted to make videos, not make money. I’m willing to forego quite a lot of YouTube content if that helps build a new paradigm for how the internet works. Would you?
Let’s get real, most of the people stayed on reddit. Only a very small fraction tried lemmy and an even smaller fraction have completely stopped using reddit.
That’s OK, I stopped using reddit completely almost a decade ago. I’m happier with a small group of nice people than with a large group of unpleasant people.
A lot of people seen to focus on profitability and maximum exposure as the goal. More and more people don’t think like that anymore.
Wow can’t believe you’re being down voted on this, guess it shows a lot of people don’t understand that it’s the foodcarts that lead to a good restaurant scene. The hobbiests that provide valuable content(that is later repackaged and sold as a product by leachers large and small).
There are some legitimate ideas to work through as far as a decentralized video hosting platform but the idea that something would be lost by every fucking nitwit looking to “make money on ads” not having a central video source foist their content on you…uhhh I’m down with that for sure.
When stuff is done for passion and interest, it’s almost always better than a paid product or service, and if you haven’t learned that yet in life you’re making me feel old.
The mistake was allowing the internet to become “the cloud” in the first place.
People should be able to host their own shit on their own machine at home. This should be simple for people to set up, like a NAS with an App Store. Default to a secure config. Don’t make it too easy; if you try to sugarcoat it all, people won’t realize what they’re getting into (like now with cloud shit)
Otherwise we get what we have now - everything from TVs to social media to fucking door locks and lightbulbs needs a connection back to the manufacturer, and they can drop support at any time. This allows the worst of rent-seeking under the guise of “everyone too dumb to do on their own”, very similar to “we must not allow security because bad guys could hurt KIDS” (while true, it’s just an excuse to read everyone’s mail to protect the ruling class from any negative opinion brewing)
Uploaders would be manually screened at sign-up, I wouldn’t run an open server. Many fediverse servers in general and several PT-instances in particular does it. It works fine for a community based platform. It’s not meant to be one, monolithic server doing it all, open for all.
There are many ways to handle storage requirements, I like datacenters with easily expandable storage.
You bring up “have fun with that” but I’m having great fun already helping out running both a Mastodon and Lemmy instance. I don’t see how a video hosting service would be much different, in regards to moderation. Maybe I’m missing part of your point?
My moderation point is that with a video service you are forced to “watch” the content in the video in order to properly moderate (though you can just block people of course). You could have a bunch of filters like YouTube does to determine if your video should have ads and whatnot or you can rely on the community (or both).
The main issue with it is that we want to prevent “bad content” that being very poor quality content to skip being all detailed. To do that kind of filtering really requires some form of community review of the content as it’s infeasible to have it all manually reviewed. If you have a community review process you open the door to mass reporting and the like so you cannot simply automatically remove content if it gets a lot of reports, it must be manually reviewed (by watching the content) to ensure it’s fair to remove it. Lemmy, at least in my usage doesn’t have this desired “bad quality” filter outside of up votes/down votes which notably don’t remove the content (and so doesn’t remove the immense storage requirement)
It seems like we have fundamental differences in how the fediverse could and should work. I don’t see this conversation going any further, thanks for the interaction.
Yeah dude this was quite nice compared to my experiences on Reddit. Might have come off too strong from all my time there.