Until a flood of TikTok users bankrupt them, anyways.
Not entirely sure how you’d make the economics of hosting endless video files work without great big piles of money and some way to get even more big piles of money on a routine basis :/
Not entirely sure how you’d make the economics of hosting endless video files work without great big piles of money
You’re absolutely right, which is why BitTorrent never managed to take off. Totally unviable, doesn’t work at all, and definitely isn’t the technology underpinning federated video services like PeerTube.
They can. And if at any point it becomes untenable, you can just archive whatever you host, shut down your instance, and put the videos up for download somewhere.
If a company is going bankrupt as a result of hosting a video service, they’re not hoping to be able to afford to archive and make it available for download either.
Yeah, video hosting is notoriously expensive. It’s why there’s still not a real competitor to YouTube, because nobody else but Google could afford to run the platform at a net loss for the amount of time required to build a profitable user base.
If even a tiny percentage of TikTok’s US user base decided to move to Loops, that may be enough traffic to not only completely disable Loops, but would probably impact the rest of the Fediverse at large, too.
Yet none of them really paywall you for using an adblocker.
Actually come to think of it, porn sites are the only place I allow ads (obv blocking the pop ups and other dark pattern fuckery)… probablys because I learned to ignore them entirely as a teen before ad blockers existed.
https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/26/24280075/fediverse-tiktok-alternative-loops-pixelfed-mastodon-activitypub-signups-open
Until a flood of TikTok users bankrupt them, anyways.
Not entirely sure how you’d make the economics of hosting endless video files work without great big piles of money and some way to get even more big piles of money on a routine basis :/
You’re absolutely right, which is why BitTorrent never managed to take off. Totally unviable, doesn’t work at all, and definitely isn’t the technology underpinning federated video services like PeerTube.
At one point BitTorrent/P2P was responsible for something like 30-40% of all global internet traffic.
The thing is the protocol never really developed beyond some useful, but minor evolutionary updates.
You say “never really developed beyond” as if that isn’t a synonym for “finished and working fine.”
Companies or creators can run their own instance can’t they?
AFAIK, it’s still not had the code released, so at the moment there’s just the one site and you can’t host your own.
They can. And if at any point it becomes untenable, you can just archive whatever you host, shut down your instance, and put the videos up for download somewhere.
If a company is going bankrupt as a result of hosting a video service, they’re not hoping to be able to afford to archive and make it available for download either.
I think this could lead to bigger activity pub instances collecting revenue for allowing company owned instances to federate. aka ad revenue.
Could you explain that idea in more detail? I’m not really sure I understand how that would work in practice.
Private instance for company/creator: Hey, can we federate with your instance?
Large public instance: pay me.
Yeah, video hosting is notoriously expensive. It’s why there’s still not a real competitor to YouTube, because nobody else but Google could afford to run the platform at a net loss for the amount of time required to build a profitable user base.
If even a tiny percentage of TikTok’s US user base decided to move to Loops, that may be enough traffic to not only completely disable Loops, but would probably impact the rest of the Fediverse at large, too.
The millions of free porn sites would beg to differ…
Free? They are ad-ridden and unlike YouTube, porn videos are removed from the site all the time.
Yet none of them really paywall you for using an adblocker.
Actually come to think of it, porn sites are the only place I allow ads (obv blocking the pop ups and other dark pattern fuckery)… probablys because I learned to ignore them entirely as a teen before ad blockers existed.
Interaction with the fediverse is very limited atm