makeasnek

I2P is really cool tech, wish more people knew about it. In a similar vein: #hyphanet (formerly #freenet) and #nostr

What exactly would prevent people from paying in actual currencies? Crypto is in no way a requirement for a YT replacement whatsoever.

You want to get paid without a middleman

This is the part you missed. Imagine Lemmy but for videos instead of links. Users pay creators via some subscription or likes mechanism. Lemmy instance admins do not want to deal with:

• Custodying the funds and having to keep them safe
• Having to make connections to every major national banking system or payment processor
• Dealing with chargebacks, payment disputes, counterparty risks, KYC/AML/other onerous regulations etc. People are used to cards being "instant" but full settlement on the backend takes days to weeks depending on how you define "settlement".

Doing these things is an absolute nightmare and takes a lot of human time. Human time costs lots of money. All this just to move money from viewers to content creators.

Bitcoin via lightning, for example, can do all of this for them without any of that mess. Payments can go P2P directly from viewers to creators. Payments can be settled instantly for <1% in fees, usually pennies.

People are working on this for general decentralized storage, some of them have existed and been functional for 5+ years, I'm not familiar with all the names but there's jstor (jstore?), filecoin, etc. When you have a system where you need to manage a database (and everybody's copy of the database is the same) but you need to do it in a decentralized, P2P way, blockchain is really the only solution. A system which records who is hosting what and allows people to buy & sell storage is exactly this: a database with some buy/sell frontend.

The key problem that needs to be solved is the monetization problem. Nostr has a potential solution though. Over the last two months alone, their users have "zapped" (tipped/donated) other users around 950K (nearly 1 mil!) USD worth via lightning and that number continues to grow. And it doesn't just make it easy to pay content creators, but to also put a portion of your "zaps" towards the relay you use or development of the software if you want. If you have a nostr account, you can easily tie it to a lightning address to send/receive tips, nostr doesn't take a fee. Relays can also portion out a bit of their zaps for the people who publish the most engaging content on their relay. The possibilities are quite extensive. And because it's over lightning, zaps happen instantly and for pennies or less in fees. Though, you can use nostr without zaps at all.

For those unfamiliar with nostr, it's a decentralized social media software much like ActivityPub/mastodon, the main use right now is as a twitter/instagram clone but there's also a reddit-style section being built up as well. Video hosting itself could be done by relays or through a P2P system similar to IPFS. Moderation abilities from the perspective of the instance/relay are identical to activitypub/mastodon. But one bonus if that if your relay goes down, you don't lose your identity, since your identity and relay are separate. And if you change apps or relays (you are typically connected to multiple relays), all your content moves with you seamlessly. And the payment/zap infrastructure is all decentralized, relays don't ever custody or manage the payments. If you tip a content creator, it goes directly from you to them. The lightning network has basically limitless transaction capacity. If you have cash app, it supports lightning, so you can already send zaps (you will need different apps to receive zaps though because cash app doesn't support the LNURL standard). Strike natively supports it. And because it's lightning, it works in every country automatically.

Long-term, if I am a content creator, which "fedi"-type system is going to be attractive to me? One where users can send me tips and mircopayments or one where they can't? This is why I think nostr is going to win out long-term over AP/Mastodon. Mastodon could add this kind of functionality but I don't get the impression they're open to it. People may not want to commit to yet another $5/month subscription to a YouTuber's patreon or nebula or whatever, but they are happy to tip 1-10c after watching a video. So there's a psychological beauty to micropayments as well. As some random person I have made like 7c on tips this month, but I've also given out plenty to other people.

Source about nostr fees: https://lemmy.ml/post/17824358

Also it’s worth mentioning the “how to distribute content among peers” problem has mostly been solved and has for over a decade, just that nobody has built out the UX for it for a YouTube clone. Torrents exist, #freenet and #hyphanet exist, #ipfs exists, these are all excellent platforms for storing and distributing content without relying on expensive, centralized hosting. Instead, users share the burden of hosting. There’s a whole category of software that solves this problem in different ways (P2P). Unfortunately, every new generation of developers seems to want to re-invent the wheel instead of using time-tested tech that already exists but just needs a UX refresh or maybe some protocol improvements.

If you have a tube site and it says “to skip ads, install IPFS”, everybody would be using IPFS.

Also it's worth mentioning the "how to distribute content among peers" problem has mostly been solved and has for over a decade, just that nobody has built out the UX for it for a YouTube clone. Torrents exist, #freenet and #hyphanet exist, #ipfs exists, these are all excellent platforms for storing and distributing content without relying on expensive, centralized hosting. Instead, users share the burden of hosting. There's a whole category of software that solves this problem in different ways (P2P). Unfortunately, every new generation of developers seems to want to re-invent the wheel instead of using time-tested tech that already exists but just needs a UX refresh or maybe some protocol improvements.

If you have a tube site and it says "to skip ads, install IPFS", everybody would be using IPFS.

Nostr has. Over the last two months alone, their users have "zapped" (tipped/donated) other users around 950K (nearly 1 mil!) USD worth via lightning and that number continues to grow. And it doesn't just make it easy to pay content creators, but to also put a portion of your "zaps" towards the relay you use or development of the software if you want. If you have a nostr account, you can easily tie it to a lightning address to send/receive tips, nostr doesn't take a fee. Relays can also portion out a bit of their zaps for the people who publish the most engaging content on their relay. The possibilities are quite extensive. And because it's over lightning, zaps happen instantly and for pennies or less in fees. Though, you can use nostr without zaps at all.

For those unfamiliar with nostr, it's a decentralized social media software much like ActivityPub/mastodon, the main use right now is as a twitter/instagram clone but there's also a reddit-style section being built up as well. Moderation abilities from the perspective of the instance/relay are identical. But one bonus if that if your relay goes down, you don't lose your identity, since your identity and relay are separate. And if you change apps or relays (you are typically connected to multiple relays), all your content moves with you seamlessly. And the payment/zap infrastructure is all decentralized, relays don't ever custody or manage the payments. If you tip a content creator, it goes directly from you to them. The lightning network has basically limitless transaction capacity. If you have cash app, it supports lightning, so you can already send zaps (you will need different apps to receive zaps though because cash app doesn't support the LNURL standard). Strike natively supports it. And because it's lightning, it works in every country automatically.

Long-term, if I am a content creator, which "fedi"-type system is going to be attractive to me? One where users can send me tips and mircopayments or one where they can't? This is why I think nostr is going to win out long-term over AP/Mastodon. Mastodon could add this kind of functionality but I don't get the impression they're open to it. People may not want to commit to yet another $5/month subscription to a YouTuber's patreon or nebula or whatever, but they are happy to tip 1-10c after watching a video. So there's a psychological beauty to micropayments as well. As some random person I have made like 7c on tips this month, but I've also given out plenty to other people.

Source about nostr fees: https://lemmy.ml/post/17824358

Are you talking about Bernie? He literally got less primary votes, thats why he lost, period. I agree the DNC tried to fuck him over, but at the end of the day he got less votes and that's all there is to it. If Bernie's voters were as vote-happy as they were loud, he would have been the winner of the primary.

They implemented a number of reforms after Wikileaks exposed their corrupt practices, their primary system is more fair and robust than it was in 2016. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Democratic_Party_presidential_primaries#Reforms_since_2016

Stewart is basically calling for a primary, which we already had, which was known for years ahead of time would happen, which literally anybody could run in, and yet nobody significant seemed interested in running. I voted in the primary, there was more than one person to vote for, Biden even lost his primary in American Samoa. To say there was "no primary" is a lie, and suggesting a party swap out a candidate who already won a primary, and by doing so throw out the votes of millions of Americans who participated in that primary process, is anti-democatic. Do you want people to switch parties and vote in the republican primary? Because that's how you do it. Did the DNC learn nothing from getting caught trying to crush Bernie's primary chances?

You lose voters you disenfranchise, period. I don't care how good the DNC's legislative aims are, if my primary vote literally does not matter, why would I ever vote in their primary again?

All versions over the past decade including the latest one

From their FAQ: "Taler supports push and pull payments between wallets (also known as peer-to-peer payments). While the payment appears to be directly between wallets, technically the operation is intermediated by the payment service provider which will typically be legally required to identify the recipient of the funds before allowing the transaction to complete. "

I made a post about all the problems w Taler here if you're interested https://lemmy.ml/post/17733761