Ask Lemmy

What keeps you away from PeerTube?

I don't think that the economics work for a revenue-free video hosting service, not in 2025. Maybe not ever, depending upon what happens with bandwidth costs.

Text is pretty small. In 2025, it's reasonable for someone to serve text to many people at relatively little cost. That lets the Threadiverse work.

Streaming video to many people is a lot more bandwidth-intensive.

Can you do something in software about that? Ehhh...well, there are limited improvements you can make.

If you give up the on-demand aspect and manage to get people Internet-wide multicast access again a la the Mbone, maybe use forward error correction to provide redundancy to permit reconstruction of dropped packets, you can get somewhat-more-efficient network utilization, kinda like TV with recording. It's still soaking up network resources, just not as much at one point, and if it scales up, at some point network providers are going to want to be paid one way or another.

Maybe people have enough upstream bandwidth today that you can require that everyone run a servent, as some P2P systems do, and only provide downstream bandwidth if they provide upstream bandwidth. Think BitTorrent or Mojo Nation or similar. I don't know to what degree that's practical, and it's basically relying on ISPs not to crack down on some services that are a lot more bandwidth-heavy than others, having users offload costs to other network users; it's really more of gaming a pricing strategy, like FidoNet. Also, NAT and firewalling is going to be a pain in the butt on the network as things stand -- I suspect that the average user isn't gonna be able to punch a hole (if their network provider even supports it).

If we assume that bandwidth gets far cheaper in the near future, to the point where everyone is just running around with so much bandwidth that streaming massive amounts of video just doesn't matter, then, okay, maybe that would do it. But I doubt that that's actually going to happen, and there may be fundamental physical limitations that prevent it. Also, while one could maybe do a video streaming service akin to those today, my guess is that if the availability of bandwidth became that much more available, that people could figure out other desirable things to do with that bandwidth that is a substitute for video, and that might largely supplant traditional video. Like, maybe instead of 2D video, you send a 3D voxel field or something, give the viewer freedom of movement.

Honestly, I'm still not sure that the Threadiverse is going to be able to handle free hosting of high-resolution images in the long term in its present form if usage scales up much. A revenue-free video streaming service seems far harder.