I feel like I'd be totally fine with ads that can be controlled user end. Like, what if there was a little switch by the video you're watching to enable ad breaks, directly supporting the creator and the instance. (As long as they're not baked into the stream so instances can't force them to be always on.)
this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2024
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Do you mean monetization so that instance hosts can recoup costs?
Or do you mean monetization so that content creation gets paid?
Initially content creation, but other brought recouping costs, so both now :) A reddit style paid award system or discord style paid emojis and stickers could be one way of funding services, but dunno how to implement that.
Why not both?
It's true that peer tube is the ugly duck of the fediverse right now. But I don't think is about monetization.
On its core it's true that is the most complex project as videos are resource heavy, and producing videos is time consuming.
I don't think people does not make videos because lack of monetization but because lack of users. And there are little users because there are little content.
IMHO the UI and UX should be the smoothest of all fediverse because it need to put it as easy as it can to everyone to attract as many users or creators as possible.
Because, let's be true, monetization (even you can already monetize if you want) is useless is there's nobody watching anyway.
IMHO the UI and UX should be the smoothest of all fediverse because it need to put it as easy as it can to everyone to attract as many users or creators as possible.
Thats true of ALL platforms. Fediverse or not. Biggest reason Linux fails where Windows 11 sucseeds is because the vast VAST majority cannot figure out linux's user experience.
In windows, you install a program by downloading a file, and double clicking it. To change settings you go into the control panel. To update a program, you download another file, just like installing it.
I could literally never have a keyboard hooked up to a windows pc, assuming all my web browser bookmarks are already saved, and I don't want to reply to any messages online.
With Linux, you can't do that. You can't just uninstall terminal, and expect to get help online if something is new and confusing to you. First thing they say in Linux is "ok, to help with this problem, open up terminal". It's baked into the Linux culture, just the same as a mouse is baked into the Windows culture since the 80s.
Now I use Linux as a standin for peertube, or any other platform since I haven't used peertube. But the lack of Linux users, despite having the technical superior OS just shows how a bad user experience can cripple a platform.
The way Linux sucseeds is by having a distro that embeds into its own culture the lack of terminal. A distro that not only DOESN'T come with terminal, but uses it as a "selling" point. Heavy airquotes there since I'm not suggesting that this distro cost money.
As for peertube, I've been meaning to try it for a while. All it needs is good content, good user experience, and it should be the EASIEST of the fediverse platforms to sucseed. Look at youtube. Find me one creator who says "I enjoy dealing with youtubes overarching control and restrictions".
I'll wait.....actually no I won't. I got things to do.
Point is, if you normalize a federated video platform where the content creator can control their own hosting? Youtube would die, and content creators could negotiate their own prices to serve ads individually on their videos.
And they don't HAVE TO host their own videos. Just that they can.
If I host a peertube instance, and 5 of my friends want to create videos, but not host them, then I can host them. But if I get greedy and say they must obide by my rules, then they can say fuck off and host it themselves. It takes overarching power away from the hoster, and that would be VERY appealing to a lot of content creators.
Then once you have the good user interface, and good content, you gain the followers, and with the followers comes the monetization.
And yes, it will be ads. Because if there were a better model, don't you think tv, and streaming services, and youtube, and the internet would have already been doing so by now?
The way Linux sucseeds is by having a distro that embeds into its own culture the lack of terminal. A distro that not only DOESN’T come with terminal, but uses it as a “selling” point.
This is the stupidest idea I've heard since I heard the stupidest idea and that was in this same channel / community, a few months ago. Half the power of Linux is the terminal, because you can be expressive in doing things there that simply can't be done in a reproducible manner in GUIs. and reproducibility is very important when you want people to adopt Linux because you need the support you give to work "almost everywhere", which the terminal does.
What is missing, more than "no terminal", is "everything (or at least most of the stuff) that is doable in a terminal SHOULD have an associated standard to access it via a GUI". But then you get into issues such as "the start menu should be in THIS corner of the screen and labelled THIS way and have the menus in THIS order"... and at the end that's just corporate Gnome image, which by this point is just Windows but for Linux (see: Icaza, Potterdung, et al.).
Biggest reason Linux fails where Windows 11 sucseeds is because the vast VAST majority cannot figure out linux’s user experience.
Nope, the bigest reason why windows is more popular than linux is the same as youtube is more popular than peertube - its the default and most people dont look past that. Honestly default Gnome UX is better than win11 these days unless you already have thousands of hours of windows muscle memory, which a very large chunk of people do.
We need to figure out good content for peertube first.
That's creating a chicken and egg problem. Many people who make good content do it because they can live off of it. In order to do so, they need to get paid. If you don't pay people, most people won't have an incentive nor opportunity to make their stuff better.
Requiring good content to introduce an option for monetisation, would be limiting it to the lucky people who already have the time and money to invest in making good stuff aka the smallest minority. Growth is made much harder without it - if not impossible on peertube, leaving only youtube as an option. I don't think that's a good solution.
First, please clarify what sort of non-ad monetization you are talking about.
Second, we don't need monetization. The commercialization of the Web, while handy for a while, is exactly why it's decayed so much. We don't need to import the cause of web rot here.
Unfortunately, Content Creator is not likely a solid long-term career. Don't take this as dismissive of the effort that goes into quality videos. Some people really do treat it legitimately as a craft. However, the vocation was basically created through heavy subsidies from tech/ad companies, trying to get eyes on the ad space that they want to sell. Due to Chicago School economics (line must go up), and the fact that there is only so much ad space, tech companies are going to look to remove the cost of these subsidies, likely through a combination of generated content and removal of payouts, so that myopic investors can be happy.
So, how can you support yourself while still creating videos, etc? Well, if you don't have a production company supporting you, you'll need to learn business yourself or sell your talent to someone who is running a production company. As much as I would like for people to be able to do whatever they want with their lives, we're currently stuck in a neoliberal hellscape where a working artist has to work and also be a business person.
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.
I think part of the problem is that many of the p2p tech are caught in a tradeoff between giving hosts control of what they host (and therefore there is content that gets lost), and ensuring content availability (risking alienating hosts).
No way would I participate in a p2p network where I don't have full control over what I host, for the same reason I won't use p2p VPNs nor will I host a TOR exit node.
But then who is going to host the unpopular content?
Each network has its own way of addressing this with pros and cons. Personally, idc, I don't mind being a "router" in exchange for other computers "routing" to me. I don't mind the idea of sharing my internet connection via wifi with my neighborhood, it should be a resource for all.
The cost of having open communication networks or free speech or privacy or any liberties is that people may use those liberties to do bad things, but I'd rather live in a world where we have liberties that sometimes get abused than in a world without liberties where those who control things get basically unlimited abuse of the same liberties we are not afforded.
The problem is we're not there yet.
There are no protections for me if I unknowingly let some stranger use me as a host or router for CP or some pedo shit. It's not a risk I'm willing to take. There need to be legal protections in place, like there are for ISPs.
I'm ok with living in a world where liberties are sometimes abused, but I'm not ok with a world where innocents get punished for the actions of strangers.
There are no protections for me if I unknowingly let some stranger use me as a host or router for CP or some pedo shit. It’s not a risk I’m willing to take. There need to be legal protections in place, like there are for ISPs.
There are, at least in the US. That's why running a Tor node is legal and so is a coffee-shop sharing their wifi to customers. They are not legally liable for actions of users, they are just routers.
I'm not familiar with those protections, but I'm not confident in them actually holding up in court considering the technical sophistication of the network compared to the technical competence of the courts.
But it's good to know that there are at least protections in theory.
Pretty well established case law at this point. If it weren't, you'd see Tor relay operators, small ISPs, etc being hauled into court constantly.
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
Very interesting, thanks
Dam thats really cool.
The problem isn't making monetization available, it's having sufficient pull in the market to make it viable.
And then the next problem is being able to scale the network big enough to handle the traffic and storage requirements for hosted video. When let me runs out of go juice The traffic can easily be handled by a few inexpensive servers. When we're talking about video storage those petabytes start getting really expensive.
The problem isn’t making monetization available, it’s having sufficient pull in the market to make it viable.
That's creating an chicken and egg problem.
We won't create monetization options until there's pull
We won't join until there's monetization
Someone has to break the tie and it's much easier for us than content creators.
When we’re talking about video storage those petabytes start getting really expensive.
You're worrying about a scenario a decade out. Also it's not like peertube is a single entity. It's a federated group of servers that will each host a part of the total. Not every peer will host the total, so there are no such restrictions on storage.
There's an important element to monetization in the Fediverse that people are not tackling:
Money movement is tracked. And we are here mostly to avoid tracking.
I have this account tied to my more-or-less-real persona, but I have 12 more accounts in the Fediverse not tied to it. If setting up something like a subscription service would mean Fediverse has to implement eg.: KYC laws, or attach accounts to real person banking info, then I'm barred from participating in this real money economy in 11/12ths of the Fediverse even if I liked the content.
If you don't donate, how will you be tracked?
I am precluded from donating, is the point.
Now, if there's a good solution to that that doesn't involve cr*pto, I'm all ears.
How are you precluded from donating? Which methods of donating exist where you are?
Peertube has a solution built in. Creators can put in links to their Patreon, Liberapay, Ko-Fi or other donation platforms, and it'll show a "Support" button underneath every video.
They don't do crypto or ads in the core Peertube project. However, you can install add-ons as an instance administrator.
I don't see any better solution as of today.
In-built monetisation that doesn't require opening third party websites for every person you want to donate to. Maybe even a tip button or "donate subscription". That's what would be better.
With "better solution as of today" I meant more a viable solution as of today. And I don't see any.
I completely agree that some in-built, more convenient monetization would be great. But... That'd immediately make them a whole different business. Now they need to handle money for people and become a payment provider. That'd probably require them to change their legal form. They need to hire people to manage that money. They get liable for it. And where money is involved there are disagreements and lawsuits. So they need an additional customer service. Probably also a proper legal team. All those people want a salary, so they have to make profit to pay them.
I think it's a nice idea, but it would turn Peertube from a nice project that's made by some programmers for us, the people, into a business halfway alike YouTube. And we already have YouTube. The nice thing about Peertube is that it's about freedom and the content and less annoying business things involved.
And that's often the case with smaller projects. Now the programmers do the thing they're good at: program the software. If we make them do something else, that's gonna be at the cost of the project. They'll become managers and can't attend to the thing they're good at and what we'd like them to do.
Feel free to come up with a solution. I'd like to hear it. Because I'd also like to see some bigger Youtubers on Peertube. And they won't come if they have to spend money on servers, instead of earning money.
There liberapay (patreon alternative) and mitra (patreon paywall alternative). there is also a peertube plugin.
Other then that having something that can show ads on videos but with an option to disable ads with pay (something like youtube premium), could be useful,
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