Mastodawn

Something I always wondered about.
Let's say you're a video creator. Let's say you make one video a week. You just like to do it, it's not your job, but people enjoy your content and watch anyway.
Where would you host it? I imagine that with something like YouTube, it's easy, because they allow you to host insane amounts of data, at the cost of you being the product.
With something like PeerTube, your costs quickly spiral out of control. Videos are big, and require a lot of bandwidth. Peertube has a peer-to-peer model, but if nobody is watching the video at the same time as you are, then you're streaming the video from the server either way. And you're still uploading potentially hundreds of gigabytes a month to your server.
What do you do? How would we make video hosting viable? Especially for people who just cannot afford the money to buy increasingly bigger hard drives or upgrade servers, or can't run it out of their home because either their connection is too slow, or they'd still like a little bit of connection to use for themselves?

Talon Nov 5, 2022

So to add to this, I've been looking at a few managed Peertube instance hosting providers, and I do not understand how they can offer instances with 10 gigabytes of storage. I'm sorry. That makes no sense to me. If you're at all serious about hosting video, to the point where you'd actually pay for your own instance, 10 gigabytes seems like a joke to me. And some of them only go up to 100 gigs? I just... do not understand. Who is this for?

Seedy! #Sweden Nov 5, 2022

@talon On my own website. At least I'm in control of my own shit and not at the mercy of the artificially intelligent DMCA mafia.

James Pain Nov 6, 2022

@talon I've used Peertube as a way to call out some cryptocurrency scam without fear of getting taken down. My experience is that nodes don't last longer than a year. I had to move my videos 3 times. Old links became invalid. I eventually gave up.

Talon Nov 6, 2022

@jpain yeah. The problem here I suppose is that video hosting is hard, video hosting is expensive, and while people might be willing to host a few 500-character text posts for free, they're definitely not willing to do that for gigabyte-large video files.

James Pain Nov 6, 2022

@talon I suppose the middle ground is https://pixelfed.org/
Might still drop off the face of the earth, but less often?

Pixelfed - Decentralized social media

Learn more about Pixelfed, the free and open-source decentralized photo sharing social media platform

Pixelfed

Talon Nov 6, 2022

@jpain Right. I also believe that is easier to host since pictures aren't quite as big as video files. Mastodon also let's you post videos and pictures, but there I guess it's almost implied that the quality is worse? Like Peertube is directly meant to host video. Since it's primary focus is video, you'd want the quality to be good. On Mastodon, video is just an addon to text posts, so it's much more forgivable if they look like crap. I think?
So it's about the intent. If I'm on Pixelfed and someone posted a snippet of music for example, I wouldn't mind if the quality was bad, since posting the music is a byproduct and not the intended usecase. But on Funkwhale, my whole reason for being there is the music itself, so naturally I'd want it to sound great.

James Pain Nov 6, 2022

@talon Absolutely. And thanks for reminding me that Funkwhale exists 👍

Sandrockcstm, in space!Nov 2, 2022

@talon I've actually thought about this a lot and I think the answer can only be: lower resolution videos (720p max), and downloads, no streaming.

The lower the resolution the less drive space you need, and if you cut out streaming then you eliminate 90% of the technical hurdles that streaming platforms have to deal with. We were sharing videos long before streaming was even a word, we just did it like we do for everything else.

Talon Nov 2, 2022

@Sandrockcstm I suppose you could find a nice middleground. Low resolution/quality streaming/downloading, and access to high quality videos if asked? So you would host a peertube with the lower quality content, and the high quality files on demand. But a huge backlog would definitely still be a problem.

Sandrockcstm, in space!Nov 2, 2022

@talon Right, and maybe for that you could go to a kind of deep storage model, where you only serve x amount of videos at a time, and the rest are put into long term storage (either physical storage or virtual with like, Amazon Glacier) but can be retrieved if requested.

yin yang yoink Nov 2, 2022

@talon you can upload a torrent but that's not even close to accessible. Or encode the video to potato quality. No way to make video hosting cheaper. Hundreds of gigabytes is a low bar, actual size will be closer to tens of terabytes.

jacob 🦀Nov 2, 2022

@talon Something TechHut find out and shared on the TilVids instance Discord is that you can re-encode your video and shrink its space needed. This could help with storage costs at the least.

Zersiax Nov 2, 2022

@Mayana I think services like Amazon S3 kinda sorta try to fill the gap where storage is concerned at least, but that doesn't solve the bandwidth issue. Pretty much why Youtube is the place to go for this kind of thing until somebody thinks of something different, I think. Like ... this was a problem 20 years ago, then Youtube happened, now it's not a problem anymore because people don't care they are the product a lot of the time, which is ...questionable, but I think more true than we'd like to admit :)

Zersiax Nov 2, 2022

@zersiax @Mayana urgh, I figured it would reply to the boosted toot. Serves me right for not using the web version :P

Andy Balaam Nov 2, 2022

@talon Yeah, it's a problem. I think there are 2 main options that are cheap:

1. Find a good instance. I have found diode.zone really good, but I have had serious trouble finding instances for my other videos, and I've had instances close down on me.

2. Run the server at home. I am seriously considering this. With afraid.org for dynamic DNS, if you have an always-on machine, a decent Internet connection, and you don't care about occasional downtime, it could be a good option.

Tagomago Nov 2, 2022

@talon I would say that first we gotta understand and accept that video on demand is the most expensive media technically and ecologically, so we should not trivialize its use. So, in this case, maybe focus the distribution to livestream and then auto-delete the files after a sensible period, say a month or two, so people will still be able to download them and keep them for themselves if they're interested. Maybe reupload if necessary from time to time...?

UnkleBonehead Nov 2, 2022

@talon Odysee, 3Speak, Dtube. They are all blockchain based. Odysee is the easiest to get started and the biggest audience. I have close to 200 videos on 3Speak and a couple on Dtube. I dont remember how many I have on Odysee. I had 2 accounts there, lol.

kelbot ◖⎚∠⎚◗Nov 2, 2022

@talon While not perfect, I think community peertube servers are a decent option. That way there's a small group of creators sharing the costs to run it which makes it cheaper for everybody vs every creator running their own. Would still cost some money but less than doing it all yourself.

Sean Tilley Nov 2, 2022

@kelbot @talon I'm running such an instance for creators that just want a place to put their stuff, no profit motive or anything. It's invite-only, and fairly small, but you get unlimited upload space.

https://spectra.video

Spectra Video

Spectra is a PeerTube instance dedicated to supporting original content creators, and building the video community within the fediverse!

Sean Tilley Nov 2, 2022

@kelbot @talon The biggest challenge for PeerTube right now is finding creators that understand what it is and how it works, who happen to be willing to put their stuff on there.

Jonah Nov 2, 2022

@talon @Mayana This is why nothing has come along to replace YouTube yet, the value proposition is basically unmatched.

When I ran a PeerTube server, I stored video on Wasabi S3 for $5/TB/month and distributed it with https://bunny.net/ for $0.005/GB; which made hosting video MUCH more affordable, but certainly not a non-zero expense.

bunny.net - The Global Edge Platform that truly Hops

Hop on bunny.net and speed up your web presence with the next-generation Content Delivery Service (CDN), Edge Storage, and Optimization Services at any scale.

bunny.net

Alexandre Oliva (moved to @[email protected])Nov 2, 2022

why not archive.org?

@talon Back when I was making video podcasts I just hosted them on regular shared hosting sites that had "unlimited" storage and bandwidth for a few dollars a month like Dreamhost. I don't know how popular you'd have to get to run afoul of their fair-use policies but at one point I was getting 10,000+ views per episode and never had any issues.