> this isn't to argue! just some clarification because i really don't copyedit/proofread well enough on HN.
No worries! Arguments are great if I can learn something.
> Peertube is this, if you want anonymous viewing of videos. I'm not sure about ease of setting up, i don't remember having any issues, which means i can package it for others, but IIRC turnkey linux has peertube as a container, which means any hosting provider that offers TKL it's essentially 4 clicks to launch a peertube server. Fediverse is a little rougher, but i imagine a content creator would be the one that would self-host (or have their own homeserver, but host it with a hosting provider for $50 a month or whatever), and everyone else can go to https://fediverse.party/ or whatever and find a homeserver. You don't need to run your own to participate. I was careful to suggest that more people should run their own instances, because i worry that the larger instances will get tired of adding 16TB drive sleds every year. I can't imagine what mastodon.social costs to run! this also ties in with your final point; the acquaintance is part of the value4value movement, so they may get donations to offset costs, but i think they have a server room on their property with a couple of racks. maybe they have solar and a sweetheart deal with their ISP - i did at one point, so i also had a server shed. still do, but i used to, too.
OK so my thing is that all of this is just too hard. Give me ONE program to run that does everything. I don't think that's impossible either (and no one). If the average user has to hear the word "container" or "linux", it's over. If they have to pay, it's over (probably, unless it's a TINY amount that basically just deters bots or something).
Also, most good widely-adopted consumer products NEVER mention anonymity. Maybe security or privacy, but never anonymity.
Always love me a little mitch in the comments :) HN hasn't lost it.
I guess what we really want here is PopcornTime for PeerTube. Maybe PeerTube is already this and I just don't know about it... the tech would be hard to make work seamlessly but a way to just get the ease of PopcornTime and the interface/product mindedness of YouTube.
> oh that technology that made buying a used HDD/SSD risky business for a few years? Now, afaik filecoin didn't serve any useful purpose, it was just another "proof of X" where X was "i'm wasting a ton of storage space for this". ipfs et al are the ones that do distributed storage.
But IMO this is a human problem -- it did what it was supposed to do, it made storage valuable. The problem is that when things get valuable, bad actors do things to try and steal that value. That's like thinking computers are bad because people try to steal them once they realize how valuable they are now that people can make money on the internet.
I'm not really the right person to defend Filecoin (there were also a few others, I wonder if I'm referring to the right one), but the idea of distributed payment-for-spare-disk-storage (does this fit the value4value movement?) makes a ton of sense to me.
IPFS is a technical solution IMO, it stops short of solving the other bits - i.e. motivating the actual money-for-storage exchange that makes the idea sustainable.
> One thing i would add - unless you absolutely need to, and i mean really need to, never upload high-def to these sort of services. Upload your FHD/QHD/8K videos to the large hosts "for backup", mark them as unlisted, and then link to them for people to archive if they wish.
> Also, most good widely-adopted consumer products NEVER mention anonymity. Maybe security or privacy, but never anonymity.
i meant anonymous as in "a user can receive a link to a video and watch it without having to log in" as well as "there's a list of content on the homepage to watch" - the same way youtube works if you go via private browsing.
> OK so my thing is that all of this is just too hard. Give me ONE program to run that does everything. [...]
Right, I agree. I'm an infra sort of person so this comes naturally. But i will try to summarize it (fediverse) in a non-geeky way: A non-creator can go on any of the existing servers and get an account if they desire - this allows them to follow the content creators they enjoy, and also helps with discovery of new content. Fediverse.party is a site that will help find a server that isn't mastodon.social. oh and you mentioned apps; those exist, but you need a homeserver. most of them probably default to creating an account on mastodon.social; i guess. You don't need to be on peertube to subscribe to a creator that uses peertube to publish - that's the key, here.
i have a little bit more faith that people can ditch youtube, by navigating this "novel" platform.
Content creators may have to wait for someone who isn't as lazy as i am to promote the "N click hosting platform for your videos" where N is small. If you create content, you might have to pay, there's no real way around that if we want to ditch youtube. There is a benefit to paying, though, and it doesn't have to be a lot, you can probably use a $5 VPS (as the saying goes) to start. If some large content creator wants to move over, they probably can afford to spend more, and it won't hurt them at all. Yes, youtube hosting is free, but it comes with caveats (such as TFA, but also losing access to your account for unknown reasons, and so on). Or they can join a peertube (or whatever) and hope the host remains online.
note: we're not content creators but we are a "host" and we pay $300/month for our racked stuff, all-in. That's not out of reach for the likes of someone like Louis Rossman, who really ought be moving off youtube; or AvE, or RedLetterMedia. It's going to take some big creators at least "simulcasting" on some other service for a while before it catches on; i just hope this catching on happens before apple, facebook, amazon (oops twitch), or microsoft start a video hosting platform with their spare disks.
Apparently your memory is better than mine; filecoin allowed one to "rent out" their unused storage. What i was thinking of was some other "proof of capacity" coin, where you didn't need a decent internet connection to mine/hold coins, just disk space. the software itself actually mined by writing hash or whatever to the disk. Copilot mentioned "burstcoin" but i've never heard of that. And filecoin apparently was based on ipfs; so i wonder if it's still going or if someone can reboot it.
it certainly didn't have good marketing campaign...
> i meant anonymous as in "a user can receive a link to a video and watch it without having to log in" as well as "there's a list of content on the homepage to watch" - the same way youtube works if you go via private browsing.
Oh yeah this is my fault, I understood your meaning but wanted to make a separate point about the average user and their very specific.
IMO the vast majority of open source projects will use that word because it is a legitimate benefit, but it's anathema to the average consumer. It just signals "this is for criminals", even if it shouldn't.
Agree it's clearly a valuable feature -- it's hard to even demonstrate the value these days. "no algorithms" or "no tracking" might work, but it's so hard to verbalize.
With regards to the F/OSS solutions like peertube and the difficulty of marketing all this stuff (filecoin with/without crypto)... There just aren't the right incentives or the right insane person hasn't come along yet.
> That's not out of reach for the likes of someone like Louis Rossman, who really ought be moving off youtube
Maybe this is a bit weird but IMO Louis has been incredibly effective in his fight for right to repair, and I would hate to sacrifice his reach for a more user-friendly platform. I agree with the idea of at least simulcasting. Maybe it's another difficulty problem.
I haven't kept up with the stuff he's doing with FUTO these days as closely, but you have to fight on the battleground you're given. Winning and moral purity are often at odds, and IMO this isn't a place where moral purity is paramount.
IMO one of the hidden lynchpins here is the default license that youtube broadcasts with. I think there's a really clear legal path to downloading a LOT of youtube if only more things were CC licensed on there (not the default YouTube license) and accessible without logging in (similar to the LinkedIn scraping case).
As I understand it, Signum (nee Burstcoin) is indeed the Proof of Capacity blockchain thingy that was using hard drives to store data with no external value. This is related to but different from to Proof of Storage schemes likes Filecoin where, IIRC, the data being stored was data of extrinsic value like PDFs or GIFs or whatever. I think that's also related to "Proof of Space-Time", meaning not only did you write the received data to disk, but you've _still_ got it written to disk.
PoC, e.g., Signum = get paid for proving that you paid for storage rather than CPU/GPU/ASIC cycles
PoS, e.g., Filecoin = get paid for renting out your storage to those willing to pay in return for storing data
Thanks for this really interesting side-thread; I have learned a lot! I've been interested in distributed storage for a long time and while I've known about PeerTube and IPFS and the Fediverse for ages I haven't really played with them personally. I go back and forth between keeping TiBs of storage online, and turning everything off as a concession to keeping my overall electricity bill in check. But in general I like the idea of letting my private machines contribute to something greater than themselves. I will have to look into the ways in which I can contribute to these projects.
A reminder that it's not anonymity in the law enforcement sense because IP addresses are akin to a pseudonym and can be tracked down.
Also, for other cases you can't expect to be anonymous unless you run script blockers. And block first party scripts for the most egregious offenders (for which their websites won't work anyway at that point I guess).
i could not think of a better term to signify "a non-logged in user" than anonymous, and i was hoping that in this sort of forum that it would be taken as ftp://anonymous@example.com:22/
No worries! Arguments are great if I can learn something.
> Peertube is this, if you want anonymous viewing of videos. I'm not sure about ease of setting up, i don't remember having any issues, which means i can package it for others, but IIRC turnkey linux has peertube as a container, which means any hosting provider that offers TKL it's essentially 4 clicks to launch a peertube server. Fediverse is a little rougher, but i imagine a content creator would be the one that would self-host (or have their own homeserver, but host it with a hosting provider for $50 a month or whatever), and everyone else can go to https://fediverse.party/ or whatever and find a homeserver. You don't need to run your own to participate. I was careful to suggest that more people should run their own instances, because i worry that the larger instances will get tired of adding 16TB drive sleds every year. I can't imagine what mastodon.social costs to run! this also ties in with your final point; the acquaintance is part of the value4value movement, so they may get donations to offset costs, but i think they have a server room on their property with a couple of racks. maybe they have solar and a sweetheart deal with their ISP - i did at one point, so i also had a server shed. still do, but i used to, too.
OK so my thing is that all of this is just too hard. Give me ONE program to run that does everything. I don't think that's impossible either (and no one). If the average user has to hear the word "container" or "linux", it's over. If they have to pay, it's over (probably, unless it's a TINY amount that basically just deters bots or something).
Also, most good widely-adopted consumer products NEVER mention anonymity. Maybe security or privacy, but never anonymity.
Always love me a little mitch in the comments :) HN hasn't lost it.
I guess what we really want here is PopcornTime for PeerTube. Maybe PeerTube is already this and I just don't know about it... the tech would be hard to make work seamlessly but a way to just get the ease of PopcornTime and the interface/product mindedness of YouTube.
> oh that technology that made buying a used HDD/SSD risky business for a few years? Now, afaik filecoin didn't serve any useful purpose, it was just another "proof of X" where X was "i'm wasting a ton of storage space for this". ipfs et al are the ones that do distributed storage.
But IMO this is a human problem -- it did what it was supposed to do, it made storage valuable. The problem is that when things get valuable, bad actors do things to try and steal that value. That's like thinking computers are bad because people try to steal them once they realize how valuable they are now that people can make money on the internet.
I'm not really the right person to defend Filecoin (there were also a few others, I wonder if I'm referring to the right one), but the idea of distributed payment-for-spare-disk-storage (does this fit the value4value movement?) makes a ton of sense to me.
IPFS is a technical solution IMO, it stops short of solving the other bits - i.e. motivating the actual money-for-storage exchange that makes the idea sustainable.
> One thing i would add - unless you absolutely need to, and i mean really need to, never upload high-def to these sort of services. Upload your FHD/QHD/8K videos to the large hosts "for backup", mark them as unlisted, and then link to them for people to archive if they wish.
TIL, thanks!