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.
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.
You pay someone else to host it for you. (Instanced social media)
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.
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 😁
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.
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.
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.
I don’t see any other choices other than:
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.
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 😁