they should just build and maintain more datacenters to store millions of hours of useless video instead
this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2025
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speedrun.com leaderboards are going to be a wasteland of dead links. What do we do with records that get lost?
I'm particularly worried about all the historical records. Summoning Salt & similar channels are gonna have problems after this, especially after the policy has been in place for several years and stuff made in this very era expires.
I wouldn't be surprised if Archive Team tries their best at archiving the current situation (difficult as it is) but nobody is going to bother doing it on-going and a WR obsoleted for months is interesting material only when edited into a documentary.
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Once again reinforcing the fact that "the cloud" is still someone else's computer. If you want control over your data, you really need to look into self hosting. Otherwise, don't be surprised when that someone else decides to change the rules for using their computer. I also can't help but think that the more the internet matures, the more the version we had in the 90's makes sense. Web 2.0 was a mistake.
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I'm way more surprised that Twitch even has video storage that old.
I have streamed a bit, and my videos were limited to one month? Maybe even less.
Twitch was never meant for video storage, so this move is not unexpected.
If you want to keep a video, download it, always. Even on Youtube you are not guaranteed to have videos forever. They still have my vid, which is almost 20 years old, nobody watches it... and it's helping no one.
Which is to say we need better preservation methods for digital content.
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it's not as easy as it sounds. The hosting on Twitch wasn't just for videos but for the chat logs synced to that video as well. So you can't just download the videos and upload them somewhere else you have to download them using Twitch's shitty tools so that you get the chat as well.
That takes a lot of time but they only got about a month to do that. And that assumes that one actually has the time, energy, access and expertise to download the stuff. What about disabled streamers? What about families of deceased streamers? They now have a month to figure all this stuff out if they even receive the news at all.
That is mainly an issue caused by the fact that the whole chat synchronization thing never got developed into an open format since everyone who cared about it was just fine with companies using their own proprietary format for it.
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Streamers can host it themselves. From what I hear around Lemmy hosting and streaming video is so cheap it can be done without money from ads ;)
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Another win for peertube and owncast.
We have all got very accustomed to the notion that we can put content on a website and it will stay there forever, permanently available, as if that site somehow has an obligation to look after it. But they don't.
It sucks, and there will be a lot of stuff lost, but it's also good to have a reminder that if there's data you really care about, you need to look after that data yourself.
It seems like since my generation had "If you put something on the Internet it'll be there forever" drilled into us as kids, many of us feel entitled to "the internet" preserving our data for us. Most people don't realize how much labor and resource usage goes into preserving data forever.
Did you genuinely interpret that as a child to mean "If you put something on the Internet will be safe forever"?
As I'm sure you are now aware as an adult, the intended meaning is very much "If you put something on the Internet which is embarrassing to you or damaging to your reputation, then it will be around forever"
It's a warning that the things you don't want to stick around could end up being precisely the things which do.
It sucks but I understand the reasons. Anything of true importance to someone should have been downloaded and/or upload somewhere else as it happens.
Eh. The Internet is too full of useless crap thst costs energy to keep alive. No one needs endless swathes of boring videos. If there are some valuable recordings there, then they can preserve those.
I agree in this case but this is what they thought at the dawn of computing, too and we lost a lot of history.
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It’s time to use Peertube and Owncast!
Peertube won't cut it. Those people in the article have thousands of hours of videostreams there. If you're streaming at 1080p, that will be around 1.5GB of storage per hour. 4k will be worse. So if you have 5000 hours of videos like the one guy in the article, that is a neat 7500GB or 7.5TB of video. There is no instance around that will allow you to save that amount of videos.
So hosting your own instance would be the only way. Looking at Hetzner storage box, 10TB of data will cost you 25€/month or 300€/years. That is money, but should be possible to pay out of your own pocket.
Storing so many videos has a financial and ecological cost. When you reach thousands of hours of videos, it's time to ask yourself if it's really useful to keep them all.
Exactly. When video recording was expensive stuff would get thrown out or overwritten a lot. Films had to be stored in the correct environment, video tapes were expensive and got reused. Stuff was lost that arguably would have some value now. But, the world isn’t going to hell for lack of early films or some episodes of a TV show.
Nowadays, it’s just too cheap to make videos and the volume has made the average quality go down. We don’t need to hoard Twitch streams and cat videos. Nothing will be lost that will be missed in 50 years. Conserving some might be interesting but it’s not going to impact people’s lives or history all that much.
Yeah, I can sort of understand the impulse that everything must be preserved no matter what because we don't know what will be useful or interesting, but it's not realistic. Embrace ephemerality! It's fine!
Even if you are in favor of preserving "everything", streamers produce a lot of crap that really is completely useless like a 30 minute start of the archived video that is just an image with a timer ticking down or just a static image.
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In announcing the change, Twitch cited the "costly" indefinite storage of these highlights, which it says are responsible for "less than 0.1% of hours watched" across the site.
I don't know how many hours are watched on Twitch, but I bet it's so many that 0.1% is still a fuckton of hours.
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