A bit paradoxal but it looks that all central platform (twitter, reddit, facebook…) are helping the spread of Fediverse. Recently we saw the impact with Twitter on Mastodon, myself I’ve discovered Lemmy even if I wasn’t a reddit user. And before that Facebook first spread friendica and diaspora. It looks next step will be around Youtube where Google try to lock more and more its user.
I think peertube is going to be much more difficult, videos require an insane level of compute/bandwidth to distribute.
I think peertube may have it’s day eventually, but it won’t be for much longer than link aggregators/microblogging
The main issue is monetization. With social media, nobody cares about getting paid but Youtube or Twitch channels are the main revenue from lots of people nowadays. Not only the creators but also editors or writers.
I could see a patreon/floatplane style system where you only get the livestreams if you pay, or video releases are delayed for a week if you don’t pay. Video sponsorships also make more money than Youtube ads I think.
It’s honestly not that bad? Most of what’s being federated with PeerTube is just metadata related to the video, the video itself is hosted on whatever instance it’s hosted at, plus some peers spreading chunks of the data around.
I’ve been running PeerTube for years, and the compute / bandwidth / storage cost is way lower with things like S3-compatible Object Storage. It’s super cheap.
The biggest drain on compute power, weirdly enough, is transcoding video. Which can definitely suck if you’re running a big site, and everybody wants to have all kinds of different video resolutions. But even this can be delegated to external workers in an upcoming update.
The compute is getting cheap now too. By the end of this year, you’ll be able to slap a couple of these in a CoLo for a few grand, and then be able to transcode hundreds of videos at once.
https://www.servethehome.com/amd-alveo-ma35d-custom-anti-gpu-silicon-for-av1-era-video-transcoding/
You’d be able to compete with 2nd tier streaming services like Nebula or Floatplane at that level.
But yeah, it’s hard to get to Youtube/Netflix efficiency at a small scale, you just can’t get the specialized hardware needed to do all the hardware transcoding and DMA media serving that they do. But we’re getting there.
Peertube take care of bandwidth issue by adding a peer to peer streaming. I don’t know if big instances are having real bandwidth issue. I think Peertube or Owncast issue is more about the money / viewers locking of Youtube / Twitch.
I’m also of the understanding that the way other current federated protocols handle video is far from efficient, that google using activitypub for YouTube would be a nightmare.
I’m new to the fediverse, exactly for those comments. I’ve tried Mastodon a few months ago, but let it go. Mostly since I wasn’t able to figure myself out there. Like, there were hashtags (yey!) but there was no way for me to follow/store the ones I’m interested in (boo!). Eventually I let it go since it felt like a tiny twitter, so maybe I did something wrong there.
And also now with Lemmy, I feel a bit out of place out the moment. Again, tags that I can see in the app I’m using (Jarboe) but Ic annot find them in the web interface.
Maybe I just need to explore more.
You should use communities, instead of tags, on lemmy.
I figured that much out.
The only problem is, as people have mentioned before me, is that there is a very good chance that there will be running_doom_on_obscure_things on lemmy.ml and “running_doom_on_obscure_stuff” on lemmy.world and “correre_doom_sul_cose_strani” on feddit.it. I believe that adding tags could solve that issue. On the other hand, it would mean that we have a doubled system. Which is not necessarily bad.
I think eventually these alternatives will eat eachother into oblivion, I think this is simply a growing pain.
Hmm… yes and no. XKCD comes to mind.
But yes, evolution will solve this issue.
There should be an option for these two communities to sync each other.
Mastodon does allow following (and pinning) hashtags. It’s a relatively new feature, was added in version 4 at the end of last year. Totally OK to prefer Lemmy though, there is no wrong way to use the Fediverse.
I think that what is scary here is the steep learning curve. For people who has already developed habits/social circles on other platforms, it’s mighty confusing. For new comers, with no expectations it’s much easier.
Much like learning a new language.
Always darkest before the dawn
For me, the way Fediverse is set up just highlighted the dangers of centralization, at least for social media. It’s hard to have all your eggs in a basket controlled by a single entity that has virtually unlimited power to do what it wants with it. Fediverse isn’t perfect, but in some aspects it’s just better.
I like Mastodon a lot. i feel like people talk more about themselves and express their opinions freely, even me.
It’s like a cozy (?) place. I feel comfortable and I surrounded by different opinions, but in a relaxing way, actually communicating and talking.
Yeah, totally get what you’re saying, it is cozy and welcoming. I’m glad I found it.
