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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 28th, 2023

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  • Ok, good luck on your project. We’ll talk when any given peertube project (based on the donation based funding model alone) reaches break even.

    I swear I’ve reviewed the finances about this a million times over. Funding models in their current form just don’t work. Content creators getting free hosting from YouTube with huge audiences are struggling to keep themselves afloat. But whatever, good luck on your project I suppose. We really need YouTube’s monopoly to end, so ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯


  • Sure! Remember though, that you are funding this project using your own money. How much does your server cost? How much does the electricity to run your server cost? You would need Gbps speed internet. How much does that cost?

    You would be funding this out of your own pocket. Thank you for doing that! Would there be a thousand more people willing to do this? What happens if you lose your job? What happens to the server?

    As you can see, this is not a technological issue, but a funding one. If you can generate funding for this somehow, you have a very viable model! IF you can find the funding.

    I am saying that funding this would be difficult. I see people just yapping about FOSS, but not funding it when the time comes.


  • Naah I thought about this before and came to the conclusion that this isn’t that bright of an idea. Here’s why.

    Why’s video hosting so expensive in the first place? Because it needs a lot of computational power, storage and bandwidth. All three things that a mobile phone does not have. If you make your client’s mobile phone do this stuff, then you’re going to slow down their phone, make it heat up more, make it degrade faster (because it would be drawing power from the battery) and take up a huge chunk of their bandwidth.

    Think of how video calls drain battery really fast. It’s just shifting the costs of hosting from the hosting side to the consumer side while making the entire operation a lot more complicated and a lot more inefficient.












  • So tiktok for the fediverse…

    Listen, I’m all for open sourcing stuff and I’m all for the fediverse and all. I just don’t understand why one would want a fediverse tiktok.

    • Short form content is addictive af and doesn’t add anything of substance to society.
    • Video hosting is expensive. Peertube is already struggling. How do you expect to financially sustain video hosting that is addictive to the user (which means more consumption) without running ads? Paywalling it won’t be an option due to the network effect as well.



  • I’m selling both. I’m saying that my functional product is superior because it has been developed democratically. At no point will some MBA guy waste money on a pointless rebrand when it could have been spent on some necessary feature. At no point will some rando billionaire come up and say, “ok, links in posts will be indistinguishable from images”.

    Again, same reason why democracies r almost always superior to dictatorships. Democratic governments work for the people more when compared to dictatorships. It makes the products n services that they offer superior.



  • Or fork it, add your own features

    U would have to have software development skills for that. What if u’r an Amazon worker who just wants to have a platform where u n ur co-workers can freely organise a strike without censorship? U’r screwed now.

    I don’t know how well this would fare, because it sounds to me like you’re replacing the dev lead position with a democracy/hivemind.

    You raise very valid points here n in the text that follows. However, if u think about it, it turns to a democracy vs dictatorship debate.

    “What would the peasants know about governing a country? A country should be governed only by experts because they know what’s best for everyone”. Of course u’r not saying stuff to this extent, but that’s kinda it. And u’r right. Dictatorships have a high risk to reward ratio. If u get a good dictator, progress can be tremendous. If u get a bad dictator, u die. Democracies generally tend to be a lot more stable and last longer.

    U can see the above trend in case of failure rates of cooperatives and corporations. Coops have a significantly less rate of failure when compared to corporations..

    As for why we don’t have social media coops? Well, social media is a pretty recent invention. It required a ton of investment to become profitable. In the capitalist model that we live in today, equity is the biggest n easiest way of fundraising. U can’t do equity based fundraising for coops. Fundraising for coops has to be in the form of bonds n loans, which is very hard to get for such new tech.

    That’s my hypothesis as to why we don’t have many social media coops running around. Take groceries however. There r retail coops practically everywhere, n in some countries they make up a huge huge chunk of the market share. Take the example of credit unions. They’ve practically existed forever n have provided much better services to their members when compared to banks.


  • Now I am confused, are you able to make changes to the Lemmy codebase? A fork?

    That’s not what I’m doing yet, although it is definitely something that I would need to do ahead.

    The platform that I’m developing has a much larger scope compared to Lemmy. It’s not just a “Fediverse’s Reddit”, but something entirely different. It has community chat functionalities similar to those of discord for example. Communities would also be able to organize in person events and so on.

    If you want to find a way to fund development, why not just work with the current team?

    I’m achieving most of the above functionalities without altering the lemmy backend source code. I’m doing this by kinda creatively using the Lemmy Client that I’m developing.

    Lemmy’s entire goal is very different from my goal for the coop. My 0 competency in Rust also makes me useless for Lemmy devs.

    I’m essentially just taking Lemmy’s source code, n jerry rigging it to get the functionality that I want while ensuring that my platform won’t affect Lemmy users in a bad way during federation.

    Of course, I would have to do some backend work to get certain functionality, but I can do that without touching Lemmy’s backend code. Not touching Lemmy’s code would be good for maintenance n overall development at least for now, when the only resource is me haha.

    I have an MVP coming up by this Sunday, so I would start posting about it from a new account. I find the client to be quite unique n beautiful looking, n m quite excited to present it to the world now haha.