The Pixelfed guy does good work, but video hosting/streaming is the most difficult use-case to compete in due to infrastructure costs; I’m interested to see how he’s planning to handle this and I wish him luck.
I think that pixelfed guy has a big problem with commitment, he has so many unfinished/unpolished projects, and he’d be able to do so much more if he wasn’t starting something new every other month.
Yeah okay, so it sounds like he’s the kind of guy who’ll build a framework, or most of it, and won’t ever really become capable of hosting a lot of videos at a watchable quality.
Technically he’ll probably have built something basically functional the community could rally behind and get going. But that won’t happen, because the people who care about the Fediverse are few, insufficiently resourceful, and most importantly don’t care about shorts.
In TikTok or instagram reels, you don’t follow people you like. You just watch stuff happening.
That’s actually the whole point of TikTok, what made it different when it started. An app for short videos where you follow people you like is more of a Snapchat competitor, not TikTok.
he mentioned in the past that the videos will be automatically deleted after some period of time, so that should make the storage situation a little bit more manageable.
Self hosting isn’t really compatible with viral content, you do something that blows up and either get the hug of death or go bankrupt from the bandwidth costs.
It doesn’t matter if virality is the goal, unless you’re suggesting it be actively prevented, virality is just a natural phenomenon of the internet. The term viral generally implies uncontrolled exponential spread. To this day, stuff goes viral without people intending it to.
And if you architect the system to scale a p2p network proportional to virality (ex. as people share it, they also self-host) you run into a ton of security and abuse challenges. We’re also stretching the definition of “self-hosting” at this point.
Self hosting isn’t really compatible with viral content
The post I was replying to claimed virality and self hosting are at odds with one another because it causes skyrocketing expense. My point was that maybe someone selfhosting a server in the fediverse is not as interested in virality. And I doubt even the most viral posts in the fediverse would break the bank of a selfhoster
We are talking about a TikTok alternative. If getting as many people as possible to see your stuff isn’t your goal, then why would you post it in the first place?
Making your content go viral is pretty much literally the only point.
Virality is nowhere near the only reason for posting videos. People post them to make jokes, teach something, reply to someone else, etc, or all the same reasons someone might make a blogpost or a post on a link aggregator.
The Pixelfed guy does good work, but video hosting/streaming is the most difficult use-case to compete in due to infrastructure costs; I’m interested to see how he’s planning to handle this and I wish him luck.
I think that pixelfed guy has a big problem with commitment, he has so many unfinished/unpolished projects, and he’d be able to do so much more if he wasn’t starting something new every other month.
Yeah okay, so it sounds like he’s the kind of guy who’ll build a framework, or most of it, and won’t ever really become capable of hosting a lot of videos at a watchable quality.
Technically he’ll probably have built something basically functional the community could rally behind and get going. But that won’t happen, because the people who care about the Fediverse are few, insufficiently resourceful, and most importantly don’t care about shorts.
Not at all, Pixelfed is very polished and gets regular updates.
Also there is no casino algorithm showing you what big data knows will make you stay for a while.
In TikTok or instagram reels, you don’t follow people you like. You just watch stuff happening.
That’s actually the whole point of TikTok, what made it different when it started. An app for short videos where you follow people you like is more of a Snapchat competitor, not TikTok.
he mentioned in the past that the videos will be automatically deleted after some period of time, so that should make the storage situation a little bit more manageable.
How ephemeral.
I can’t wait for it to be used for important long term information.
I think streaming works best where people self host their own media tbf.
Self hosting isn’t really compatible with viral content, you do something that blows up and either get the hug of death or go bankrupt from the bandwidth costs.
Maybe the problem in that equation is the expectation of virality and not self hosting?
It doesn’t matter if virality is the goal, unless you’re suggesting it be actively prevented, virality is just a natural phenomenon of the internet. The term viral generally implies uncontrolled exponential spread. To this day, stuff goes viral without people intending it to.
And if you architect the system to scale a p2p network proportional to virality (ex. as people share it, they also self-host) you run into a ton of security and abuse challenges. We’re also stretching the definition of “self-hosting” at this point.
The post I was replying to claimed virality and self hosting are at odds with one another because it causes skyrocketing expense. My point was that maybe someone selfhosting a server in the fediverse is not as interested in virality. And I doubt even the most viral posts in the fediverse would break the bank of a selfhoster
And my point was directly in response to your point.
We are talking about a TikTok alternative. If getting as many people as possible to see your stuff isn’t your goal, then why would you post it in the first place?
Making your content go viral is pretty much literally the only point.
Virality is nowhere near the only reason for posting videos. People post them to make jokes, teach something, reply to someone else, etc, or all the same reasons someone might make a blogpost or a post on a link aggregator.
Snapchat would have been easier in that sense