My fantasy is Apple heating up a feud with Facebook and integrating some kind of “self hosting” into the iPhone. EG our Moms “upload” the video, but what really happens under the hood in the phone streams the video on demand to her family. IIRC there are similar swarming schemes out there already.

It sounds crazy, and it used to be, but snartphones/modems are so fast now they could host little web servers on their efficiency cores, without breaking a sweat.

…Otherwise, this is a difficult issue, as video is so expensive to centrally host.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 days ago

Hosting maybe, but there is no way you're serving any content from a phone on a mobile network from a mobile device. That's just a nonstarter.

Also, why is Apple any better than Facebook in this scenario?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 days ago

In regards to storage costs, I'm happy to self host a good solution. But right now there are none.

Your idea about streaming from phones is pretty nice but as someone who uses lots of background data, it can suck up your battery. A good idea though and I don't think that stops it being feasible.

There was a project called Circles that used a Matrix server to host private rooms you could invite people to where it was more like a feed, with photo galleries and videos and things. It got funding pulled but as far as I could tell it didn't really have a future because they hit the limits of the technology stack, but it was a cool idea that was simple enough that you'd be able to get non-tech users onboard. Project is basically dead now though.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 days ago

Apple is working on competing with AWS. Maybe they could offer hosting services for fediverse projects and provide a few grants to shiny platforms to reduce reliance on X and Facebook.