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Lemmy and Mastodon feel like the real web3. (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

349 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I think this decentralization and federation is what web3 is all about, without all the corporations calling everything to do with monkey pixel art that costs a million dollars "web3"

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[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I have a hard time imaging a free, open video hosting service will ever succeed. YouTube's infrastructure is insane, and that's reflected in their costs.

Any sustainable video hosting platform is going to need a solid monetization plan because the costs of hosting and streaming exabytes of video is just not sustainable on donations. Platforms like Floatplane or Nebula seem like good alternatives, but they've chosen for a subscription-only model - which I personally think is the fairest solution.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I agree that it's difficult, although the whole point of having a federated platform is that no single node would have to host exabytes themselves but each instance could host a certain amount of videos that are relevant to its topic. This of course comes with other downsides but I don't think there's ever going to be a perfect solution.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Storage is cheap but at scale the bandwidth requirements are too much for hobbyists to handle

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That has the same problem as any federated service like Lemmy... all that content only exists at the whims of whomever is willing to run the server and foot that bill. If they decide to delete their server, or just screw up and it dies... all that is gone.

We're basically relying on thousands of individuals to be good quality sysadmins and infosec engineers, all for free.

I guess we could move to a mirroring/caching concept so that no single node contains the only copy of loads of data, but then we're duplicating huge quantities of data.

Like even today with Lemmy, there's now thousands of instances stood up and I bet 2/3 of those will be dead within 6 months. So all those posts and comments that get made on those nodes will just go poof... which might be fine for a chat system, but for forums and microblogging (mastodon) that seems terrible

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don't disagree with what you're saying but I'd like to offer two "counterpoints" (I don't see this as a debate but I don't know a more fitting term)

Theoretically, a lot of web services are owned by companies that fold, it has happened many times in the past and will many times in the future. Centralizing through a business brings more stability since there is a more clear monetary incentive and companies are generally legally forbidden from just taking the money and running but it has happened.
This reminds me of the earlier days of the internet when a lot of the content was self-hosted and could vanish as soon as the owner discontinued its operation for whatever reason. I think that as this matures we'll see more non-profits and companies enter the space which might bring a bit of stability.

I really hope that this won't all just fold in on itself after the hype starts to wane, and I personally don't think it will (aside from a period of turbulence) but I have been wrong before.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

The optimist in me really hopes for this to be true. And it makes a lot more sense vs the crypto-fuelled web3.0 dream.

Also, folks just putting in insane hours of free work is not new considering FOSS projects and even Reddit moderation. And folks who'd like to pay just for something to exist/continue to exist, a la, Patreon.

When you have a heavily personal stake and emotional investment, I definitely see folks paying a monthly fee to keep servers afloat and help with the admin tasks for a server. Vs paying a nebulous corporate entity which will continue to mine your data regardless of how much you pay them.