the bottleneck to peertube seems to be populating and having more viewers, not hosting costs.

Object Storage is relatively cheap, and goes a long way towards affordable hosting. Processing video, on the other hand...

I wonder about this a lot. The little research I did suggested DigitalOcean is footing the bill for the moment (and also for Pixelfed? would love to hear more about this). Google, Facebook, TikTok, etc.. have all managed to throw enough resources at similar products that people expect a level of performance that is very expensive to maintain. There is some serious hardware and distribution issues ($$$$) with trying to host an "instant and endless stream of short form video".

In a counter point though I think large instances like lemmy.world and lemmy.ml have found ways to survive and thrive and the fediverse generally seems to be supported in a very grassroots sort of fashion. Donations, patrons, people who have the hardware and bandwidth sharing what they can for the greater community. Perhaps loops will go the same way.

the videos get automatically deleted after some time.

I got mine within a few minutes.

Same

Yeah the app seems quite polished already around the video viewing experience at least. Wonder how it populates the default feed.

How did you get an account?

It's making me login to see that page

v smooth. too smooth. I like it.

Its always a risk putting your faith into a single person, but Dan is the same guy who built Pixelfed. He's a Fediverse OG, literally the exact opposite of a grifter. Trusting him is a risk for sure, but I can't think of many other developers I'd trust more than him (at least in terms of his intentions and determination... I'm not a skilled dev so I can't speak to whether he actually does good work, but Pixelfed seems incredibly legit given the limited resources he's worked with)

At a guess, bc the timing might seem right with all the controversy surrounding Tiktok? Knowing that this is out there may increasing the number of contributors to the codebase.

Also I recall clicking on a GitHub page at some point for a front-end web UI for this content, so while the sourcecode of the app itself may not be available yet, there is a way for someone to make their own instance to receive the federated content. I think.

In comparison, the Sublinks project garnered so much attention that the Lemmy.World admins seemed ready to jump onto it the moment that it was halfway ready, but now we haven't heard of any progress whatsoever for months and people seem to have given up hope for it. So communication about a project can be quite important as well as the actual coding itself.

not having it be littered by bigots and have an add every 4 scrolls, along with better privacy, is probably the reason why.

Yes.