How often do images “not load” when browsing lemmy? How often do sites get hugged to death even now? And that is kilobytes of data.
Video is a mother fucker. It always has been. Those of us who are old enough to remember will understand WHY youtube was such a revelation (or why so many porn sites still have a huge thumbnail archive…).
And it is why the various “youtube alternatives” like Nebula or (sex pest adjacent) floatplane don’t have free video. EVERYTHING is paywalled because free video would make their hosting costs increase exponentially.
And yes, in theory, distributed hosting can lessen that burden. Anyone who has played a listen server heavy online game will already understand why that is a pipe dream.
A lot of smaller multiplayer games and older live games. Also a not insignificant number of fighting games.
If you ever noticed rubber banding or games straight up being broken if the wrong player is the host: That is your friendly reminder of how shitty most people’s internet setup actually is. People piggy backing off the starbucks on the first floor is a meme for a reason.
I feel like the true decentralised approach to video that may work… Are torrents. Don’t know if PeerTube works that way, but if you’re allowing people to eat your bandwidth with direct streaming, you’re gonna run into problems sooner or later.
Have you ever tried to torrent something less popular? One seed with shit upload getting ganged up on by ten leeches. Five of which disconnect the second they hit 100%.
Regardless, a torrent-like approach would work for large creators like Michael Reeves where thousands of people are going to be willing to act as seeds indefinitely. Someone like Matt Yuan might be lucky to have enough seeds for the latest two videos.
And it also doesn’t work for anything live. And becomes a huge mess for premiers where people need to wait for the upload to propagate. MAYBE the latter could be handled with pre-seeding with an unlock coming at the release time but… it is a matter of minutes until a kick level creator nopes out by uploading CSAM “for the lolz”
Yeah…
How often do images “not load” when browsing lemmy? How often do sites get hugged to death even now? And that is kilobytes of data.
Video is a mother fucker. It always has been. Those of us who are old enough to remember will understand WHY youtube was such a revelation (or why so many porn sites still have a huge thumbnail archive…).
And it is why the various “youtube alternatives” like Nebula or (sex pest adjacent) floatplane don’t have free video. EVERYTHING is paywalled because free video would make their hosting costs increase exponentially.
And yes, in theory, distributed hosting can lessen that burden. Anyone who has played a listen server heavy online game will already understand why that is a pipe dream.
What types of games are listen heavy?
A lot of smaller multiplayer games and older live games. Also a not insignificant number of fighting games.
If you ever noticed rubber banding or games straight up being broken if the wrong player is the host: That is your friendly reminder of how shitty most people’s internet setup actually is. People piggy backing off the starbucks on the first floor is a meme for a reason.
I feel like the true decentralised approach to video that may work… Are torrents. Don’t know if PeerTube works that way, but if you’re allowing people to eat your bandwidth with direct streaming, you’re gonna run into problems sooner or later.
Have you ever tried to torrent something less popular? One seed with shit upload getting ganged up on by ten leeches. Five of which disconnect the second they hit 100%.
Regardless, a torrent-like approach would work for large creators like Michael Reeves where thousands of people are going to be willing to act as seeds indefinitely. Someone like Matt Yuan might be lucky to have enough seeds for the latest two videos.
And it also doesn’t work for anything live. And becomes a huge mess for premiers where people need to wait for the upload to propagate. MAYBE the latter could be handled with pre-seeding with an unlock coming at the release time but… it is a matter of minutes until a kick level creator nopes out by uploading CSAM “for the lolz”