There are already distributed video hosting solutions. They all the same three problems:
- CSAM. Lemmy admins are already having to deal with assholes who upload child porn and then the federated instances who are less vigilant
- Discoverability: If we start having curated lists of what content people are willing to host then you will never see any new creators who didn’t get big elsewhere
- Monetization: This goes without elaboration
So the end result is what we already see a lot of lemmy boards as. Just shamelessly copying anything popular off of reddit or hackernews.
That is the issue with video hosting. You basically need an entire cloud compute business to even attempt to justify the costs.
rezz@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Yes - you cannot allow (a) free users (b) who can upload content randomly, lest you have the above problems.
You 100% cannot mimic YouTube outright in the fediverse. But you can definitely make federated video 100x better if this isn’t the objective.
overzeetop@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Remind us again how you are building something like Lemmy, which allows free users to upload content?
rezz@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Not “like” Lemmy, FWIW. Lemmy already allows for permissioned users and those servers can still be federated with something like Lemmy World.
If you wanted to do it quick and dirty, you could have a permissioned Lemmy (like other closed Lemmy servers) whereby the permission was say, pay-as-you-go with a Stripe portal. I pay $50 for a year to be a user.
On the other side, this user does not have permission to post content/links (this is also a feature, whereby a community creator can allow only mods to post content).
Creator-permissioned accounts (ones that can start communities and post) are white-listed effectively by the server operators.
It is with these users that the $50 is shared after server costs are considered.
These users can do the default which is content is posted and closed on the instance. But an “open” community could effectively be the place for free content, and those “freemium” links would be shareable with federated servers more easily.
The real trick is: can you implement it such that I could pay for this server as a user of Lemmy World and not have to create a new account. That’s the hardest part of federated, subscription Lemmy-as-YouTube.