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TikTokers are heading to UpScrolled following US takeover (www.theverge.com)
submitted 7 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 19 points 7 months ago* (2 children)

Build it on top of Bittorrent. If you like a post, you're seeding it. When you want to stop seeding it, your like goes away.

Then popular things will have a large pool of seeds mitigating much of the bandwidth cost to the instance host.

With the side effect of making manipulating the voting algorithm with bots a lot more expensive.

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  • [–] 15 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    I think people would be pretty quickly upset by the batter and storage drain from this. I have to imagine if picking an instance is a barrier to mastodon, most folks are not interested enough to learn the mechanics of why likes suddenly use system resources, and see it as a failing of the app.

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  • [–] 10 points 7 months ago

    Plus the network usage for people with data caps, ISPs who throttle you for any p2p traffic etc it’d be a mess. Not to mention torrents usually have a ‘ramp up’ time as they find and connect to peers, probably not what people used to and endless stream of autoplaying short-form videos would want.

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  • [–] 5 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    I don't see any other choices other than:

    1. You host it yourself. (Peer to Peer social media)
    2. You pay someone else to host it for you. (Instanced social media)
    3. You trade your digital freedom, privacy and political stability of your country to someone else to host it for you. (Meta, X, TikTok)

    3 hasn't been working out so far and people really don't want to have to pay another subscription. So you can spend your battery life and data instead. Maybe setup the service so that other people can seed on your behalf, so you could use your own resources or pay for someone elses all in the same ecosystem.

    Peertube does a similar thing, using bittorrent to share the load, but it only works while you're actively watching the video so outside of very popular videos it is usually just the instance who is providing bandwidth. By tying the data sharing directly into the primary interaction method it creates a much larger pool of peers and, eventually, once everyone stops seeding it the data stops existing.

    No permanent record of everything you've ever posted, no central repository of data to be hoovered up by the AI startup who pays off the instance owner, no empowering a single person to control all of social media for their own selfish ends.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    I am aware of the problems and have had similar thoughts about how best to deal with the taxing reality of streamed video, but I think the reality of it is, while already fighting the network effect and ad budgets, someone that downloads an app and see it saps half their battery for that day because they liked 5 videos and left, they are going to uninstall it.

    I think instanced makes the most sense, and even that would be a hard ask if popularity every spikes.

    I think the fact that Peertube which I think of as more a PC interface, where bandwidth and power consumption are less an issue, but still chooses to limit the peer connections to active watching speaks to how discordant the idea is with what people expect from streaming media.

    I would happily use a desktop app as you described, so if it ever exists, let me know 😁

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  • [–] 3 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    I am aware of the problems and have had similar thoughts about how best to deal with the taxing reality of streamed video, but I think the reality of it is, while already fighting the network effect and ad budgets, someone that downloads an app and see it saps half their battery for that day because they liked 5 videos and left, they are going to uninstall it.

    The tech is already most of the way there.

    Consider this.

    There is already a type of community that has developed sets of rules and incentive structures such that they have created a distributed service with petabytes of storage for content and gigabits of excess bandwidth for delivery.

    This service is in such demand that people will voluntarily study for and take a test (waiting hours in line for their 1 on 1 interview/test). This is in addition to their buying/renting their own storage and bandwidth and adding it to the pool that comprises this service. Much more work than plugging a phone in to charge!

    What I'm describing is a private bittorrent tracker community.

    They've created a scalable, peer to peer, media storage and retrieval service (for public domain videos and music, which are the best) where you're required to contribute AT LEAST as much as you take (1.0 share ratio).

    In addition, by publicly displaying the upload/download statistics about a user's account it has turned into a source of social credit. People seed massively in excess of what they will every download in order to have the highest ratio. The social systems and norms are aligned with the good of the service.

    People love the high ratio people, after all everyone loves downloading a 85GB 4k HDR+ copy of It's a Wonderful Life at 15gbps, that's only possible because Joe Ratio has a seedbox on a 50Gb connection serving up classic movies(super classic and old) for clout.

    You don't even have to worry about having movies downloaded in advance when you can just have your seedbox grab your favorite Charlie Chaplain movie and have it available for streaming directly from the seedbox in less time than it takes to grab a glass of water.

    Take the model of a public tracker and create a decentralized messaging system around it (I think there is one or two projects like that already floating around but the names escape me). Bittorrent already has a distributed hash table (DHT) service which can completely replace a centrally hosted tracker or run along-side hosted trackers.

    You are also right that it would have to be easy, but that's possible. Signal has some of the most advanced encryption systems available but to the average user it's just text messaging. There are some talented frontend developers and UX designers out there but that's not my lane and I have confidence in them.

    It's a neat idea to think about, at least

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  • [–] 4 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    I am aware of private trackers. I guess to me, even in the space of "it's neat to think about" something like Loops and built on activity pub makes more sense.

    Now if we imagined folks offering home hardware or 'seed boxes' to help an instance out, that I could see being useful tech, but constantly uploading from your phone seems a bit silly.

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  • [–] 4 points 7 months ago

    I like the home hardware seedbox idea.

    You could probalby make it as simple as plug it in and scan the QR code on your phone to pair it to your account, give it your wifi password or ethernet cable and it's sitting there donating a little bandwidth to the swarm and earning a 'I'm seeding rn'-kind of badge (people love gamification and cosmetics).

    Good brainstorming, was fun o7

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago

    I think the answer is AV1. You can get good quality video into 500 NB per hour which is easily affordable with unobtrusive ads like a banner at the bottom of the app and a video ad that can be swapped away every 10 videos.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    Honestly the best way I've seen this handled is how Odysee did it. There's crypto involved, but ignoring that, they essentially just asked users to choose to allocate an amount of their hard drive/bandwith to be used for storing, and sharing videos.

    That would work better from an end user perspective, rather than running their data usage up, and using storage on a storage-limited device like a phone, and I'm sure there's a way to incentivize it that isn't crypto

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    I don't get it, isn't sharing videos generating data usage? I need to check how that works

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  • [–] 3 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    It would be, I forgot to mention an important piece: Cellular data is typically metered relatively strictly (most plans I've seen allow "unlimited", but it's usually slowed way down if you use more than 10-15gb in a month) where most home internet connections aren't, and with something like TikTok the expected use is mobile. If we're going with the like = seed option, that does imply the seeding is happening from the device that liked the video.

    With the Odysee model, I could set up my home PC (on an unmetered* connection) to have, say, 250gb set aside for videos to be shared from. It would be an intentional act that is unambiguously using up some bandwidth/data, and can't be as easily misunderstood by the end user. Maybe find some way to incentivise it (preferably not crypto, but I do dislike this implementation of crypto less than most), but largely I think helping the community would be incentive for enough people to keep the network going, at least for a while.

    *They're technically metered, but every internet plan I've seen limits you to terabytes of data up/down, not gigabytes

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago*

    Oh that makes sense, in this case it would need something like a toggle to only share data on WIFI, kinda like Google Photos and Immich do

    Maybe predownload videos on WIFI (Tiktok already has this function) and only use mobile data for comments and replies, and asking the user in case they are on mobile data if they want to download videos on demand.

    Anyways, I was thinking on ways to make it work without the crypto while keeping the P2P aspect. Thanks for the explanation.

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