That's what I was getting at with my second sentence. Someone has to make up that loss, and that someone is very likely calling the shots on content moderation.
I swear I always seem to pick the alt-tech sites that are ready to off themselves the second I get involved. Ruqqus, Parler, Minds, Gab.
Don't feel bad. The vast majority of alternative websites are destined for failure. If you could pick the winners you'd be a millionaire from the stock market. I picked Odysee over Rumble too, which seemed reasonable enough until the government intervened.
By the way what happened to Minds? I just remember Tim Pool pushing it, but I don't know if they are still going on.
I will suggest if you're actually serious about game development and hosting your PR on some platform, it makes sense to pay that platform.
On the one hand, I can see his point. If you've got multiple GBs of files stored there, that can be hotlinked and various other resource draining things, that can get costly.
It's one of the reasons twitch has not, and likely never will turn a profit. It's like a thousand dollars for a ten minute streamed video in 1080p, more for 4k. Per person watching.
On the other hand, free hosting services pretty much don't allow anything but pictures to be linked to, and only for awhile, with a metered amount for the really popular stuff. So this just brings it in line with that, but only for text. Which seems arbitrary. But it's his place to run. I'd probably lock it down too if shit started costing me money.
What's needed is self-hosting, then if you're sharing 100 GiB it doesn't matter to Gab at all.
All that's really needed to democratize the internet is 1) a commercial IPFS cache service and 2) support for IPFS in apps. Brave and Opera already support IPFS.
The reason a commercial IPFS cache is needed is because IPFS is designed around nodes caching data for other random nodes. This is like hosting a Tor endpoint - never going to happen. It's too risky with CSAM, getting raided and having to prove you had no way to access it (good luck). But a commercial service just points the feds at whoever paid the bill. Also lots of nodes have to download from an IPFS source before it gets cached and sped up, so it can't adapt quickly and your source share has to be online all the time.
So instead of paying Gab $10/month to store your uploads you pay Cloudflare $5/month and post the IPFS link to Gab - or anywhere else.
edit: this is 'self-hosting' because if you stop paying Cloudflare you can just host it yourself on your phone or PC, since IPFS links are to content not location, it'll just be too slow to be a social media influencer.
The only way you could counteract this and not go to an advertising model is to charge for everything. Text included. That however considering the costs of bandwidth and storage, would have the effect of pricing people offline.
We already have a precedent for that in the 1980s. PRESTEL. Charged a one off fee for initial access, monthly fee for access, also had surge pricing for peak times per minute and many services charged per page accessed. It only got 90,000 customers at its peak. Treat consumers like a cash cow and assume they have infinite cash for your bandwidth and storage and they vote with their wallets.
The only affordable option at that point would be to touch grass!
I suggest going to poast or some other fediverse instance instead. Gab used to be a part of fedi, but they broke themselves off after a while and created a walled garden.
He could have done something like make free users have a lower upload size cap, or make it so their uploads are temporary and get deleted after a certain amount of time unless they get a high amount of engagement.
Yup. The reason YouTube is so hard to dethrone is is because of that expense. It's really hard to pay for without some very sleazy strings attached.
That's what I was getting at with my second sentence. Someone has to make up that loss, and that someone is very likely calling the shots on content moderation.
It’s probably due to illegal funding from Google into Youtube.
Google is abusing their monopoly in search to destroy competition in video hosting.
See the Sherman Antitrust laws.
Yeah, YouTube doesn’t make money, but AdSense does, and guess what Google combines with it on their revenue sheet?
Ascii art makes a comeback!
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Don't feel bad. The vast majority of alternative websites are destined for failure. If you could pick the winners you'd be a millionaire from the stock market. I picked Odysee over Rumble too, which seemed reasonable enough until the government intervened.
By the way what happened to Minds? I just remember Tim Pool pushing it, but I don't know if they are still going on.
I will suggest if you're actually serious about game development and hosting your PR on some platform, it makes sense to pay that platform.
That'd be Bluestorm's first account. Given what he is I'd be much more wary.
Good. "Free" is an illusion and the sooner the marketplace breaks away from that particular haze the better.
This is about image hosting not comments.
On the one hand, I can see his point. If you've got multiple GBs of files stored there, that can be hotlinked and various other resource draining things, that can get costly.
It's one of the reasons twitch has not, and likely never will turn a profit. It's like a thousand dollars for a ten minute streamed video in 1080p, more for 4k. Per person watching.
On the other hand, free hosting services pretty much don't allow anything but pictures to be linked to, and only for awhile, with a metered amount for the really popular stuff. So this just brings it in line with that, but only for text. Which seems arbitrary. But it's his place to run. I'd probably lock it down too if shit started costing me money.
Agreed. That would also be annoying. We'll see how it plays out.
What's needed is self-hosting, then if you're sharing 100 GiB it doesn't matter to Gab at all.
All that's really needed to democratize the internet is 1) a commercial IPFS cache service and 2) support for IPFS in apps. Brave and Opera already support IPFS.
The reason a commercial IPFS cache is needed is because IPFS is designed around nodes caching data for other random nodes. This is like hosting a Tor endpoint - never going to happen. It's too risky with CSAM, getting raided and having to prove you had no way to access it (good luck). But a commercial service just points the feds at whoever paid the bill. Also lots of nodes have to download from an IPFS source before it gets cached and sped up, so it can't adapt quickly and your source share has to be online all the time.
So instead of paying Gab $10/month to store your uploads you pay Cloudflare $5/month and post the IPFS link to Gab - or anywhere else.
edit: this is 'self-hosting' because if you stop paying Cloudflare you can just host it yourself on your phone or PC, since IPFS links are to content not location, it'll just be too slow to be a social media influencer.
The only way you could counteract this and not go to an advertising model is to charge for everything. Text included. That however considering the costs of bandwidth and storage, would have the effect of pricing people offline.
We already have a precedent for that in the 1980s. PRESTEL. Charged a one off fee for initial access, monthly fee for access, also had surge pricing for peak times per minute and many services charged per page accessed. It only got 90,000 customers at its peak. Treat consumers like a cash cow and assume they have infinite cash for your bandwidth and storage and they vote with their wallets.
The only affordable option at that point would be to touch grass!
I suggest going to poast or some other fediverse instance instead. Gab used to be a part of fedi, but they broke themselves off after a while and created a walled garden.
He could have done something like make free users have a lower upload size cap, or make it so their uploads are temporary and get deleted after a certain amount of time unless they get a high amount of engagement.