this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2024
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Technology
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The Pixelfed guy does good work, but video hosting/streaming is the most difficult use-case to compete in due to infrastructure costs; I'm interested to see how he's planning to handle this and I wish him luck.
I think streaming works best where people self host their own media tbf.
Self hosting isn't really compatible with viral content, you do something that blows up and either get the hug of death or go bankrupt from the bandwidth costs.
Reminds me of the time somebody namedropped a hobbyist's project on prime time national radio in the UK. Their project was a train timetable tracker website, made because the official resource didn't work too well. The site went down nearly instantly 🤣
Maybe the problem in that equation is the expectation of virality and not self hosting?
It doesn't matter if virality is the goal, unless you're suggesting it be actively prevented, virality is just a natural phenomenon of the internet. The term viral generally implies uncontrolled exponential spread. To this day, stuff goes viral without people intending it to.
And if you architect the system to scale a p2p network proportional to virality (ex. as people share it, they also self-host) you run into a ton of security and abuse challenges. We're also stretching the definition of "self-hosting" at this point.
The post I was replying to claimed virality and self hosting are at odds with one another because it causes skyrocketing expense. My point was that maybe someone selfhosting a server in the fediverse is not as interested in virality. And I doubt even the most viral posts in the fediverse would break the bank of a selfhoster
And my point was directly in response to your point.
We are talking about a TikTok alternative. If getting as many people as possible to see your stuff isn't your goal, then why would you post it in the first place?
Making your content go viral is pretty much literally the only point.
Virality is nowhere near the only reason for posting videos. People post them to make jokes, teach something, reply to someone else, etc, or all the same reasons someone might make a blogpost or a post on a link aggregator.