32 ms·

Dtube – A decentralized video platform using STEEM and IPFS

558 points by WhiteRiceWill 9y ago

gigatexal 9y ago
The cash amount by each video mean what?
- thecatspaw 9y ago
  thats what the users earned by getting liked by other users
  - dayaz36 9y ago
    cumulatively or is that how much they're earning per month?
    - drdeca 9y ago
      My impression is that it is all within the first 20 days after posting, but I haven't looked into it closely and could easily be remembering incorrectly or have misunderstood.
    - mtgx 9y ago
      It's how much they've earned for that particular video so far. I've been saying it for a while here but nobody seemed to listen. d.tube is way better for smaller creators than YouTube is right now, and with a tiny fraction of YouTube's audience. Plus, YouTube is only going to get worse for small creators, as Google tries to cater more and more to the big companies and punish the creators for "advertiser-offensive content". Meanwhile, d.tube should get better and better as both it and STEEM (the tipping mechanism) rise in popularity. The nice part is the creators don't even have to give-up YouTube to try out d.tube. They can just upload the video to both and see for themselves what's the difference.
      - stctgion 9y ago
        With a new monetised platform, with money being incredibly obvious on the UI, the incentive is pretty high to just steal popular content from YouTube and repost it. How do they ensure original content or ownership?
        rrcaptain 9y ago
        They don't. People are going to get screwed and sued over this.
        slimshady94 9y ago
        Automated AI algorithms, some day.
        weego 9y ago
        how is an "AI algorithm" going to figure out a newly uploaded video is a dupe of a Youtube video that is in the process of trending? How would you effectively contentID every single popular video on Youtube and run it against a fully distributed video platform? Just magical AI things I guess?
        j0hnM1st 9y ago
        contentID sort of thing is actually possible - I am actually working on a proof of concept AI bot to identify spam and plagiarism. some basic info is here : https://steemit.com/hello/@thefreebird/init-1 https://steemit.com/hello/@thefreebird/init-1
        yAnonymous 9y ago
        If Facebook doesn't care about enforcing copyright, why should such a small website? That really seems like an argument that is made only to hurt startups.
        thecatspaw 9y ago
        > That really seems like an argument that is made only to hurt startups. you're looking at this the wrong way. Yes, startups should enforce copyright. But so should facebook. They just get away with it because they are big
    - nafest 9y ago
      You can only earn the first seven days after the post was created.
      - Tepix 9y ago
        If you create something that has a lasting appeal you should repost it every X days.. Sounds dumb.
  - jerguismi 9y ago
    How liquid are those earnings? Can they be withdrawn easily and converted to BTC/USD?
    - RandomInteger4 9y ago
      The earnings are in the form of Steem Power, Steem,and steem dollars. The latter was apparently an attempt to make a stable currency, which tracked the dollar, which failed to live up to its goals. Steem power is very illiquid and takes time to "power down" the steem power into steem. Steem is the main currency, which you trade on the markets (along with Steem dollars).
    - sneak 9y ago
      Yes, although about 50% of the payout amount in the default case is in the form of Steem Power, which takes ~12 weeks to convert to STEEM which can be instantly traded like any other coin. Delay aside, it’s all the author’s.
- erikig 9y ago
  The same payout model is implemented on https://steemit.com https://steemit.com - take a look there as well.
forkLding 9y ago
Can there be a general explanation for what all the things including the cash symbols mean and how all the videos sourced from (like using IPFS) if its not too privately protected? Much thanks! EDIT: Nevermind, found it, link below: https://steemit.com/video/@heimindanger/introducing-dtube-a-decentralized-video-platform-using-steem-and-ipfs https://steemit.com/video/@heimindanger/introducing-dtube-a-...
- dvddgld 9y ago
  Thanks for the link
jzebedee 9y ago
If you're not familiar with STEEM or its currency, you can check the FAQ. [1] [1] https://steemit.com/faq.html#What_is_the_difference_between_STEEM__STEEM_Power__and_Steem_Dollars https://steemit.com/faq.html#What_is_the_difference_between_...
RandomInteger4 9y ago
Steem looked like an interesting idea, but your content lives and dies with the platform's whales, which are either insiders or a few people who believe in the platform. If the whales don't interact with your content, you're not likely to get much revenue. You voting power -- the amount you contribute to content you interact with -- is directly tied to your steem power, so unless you put money into the platform or managed to make money and kept it in the platform, you're not going to contribute much. Similarly, as a user, contributing upvotes, comments, etc. nets you a curation reward, but this comes in trickles mostly unless you lease your steem power to vote bots. Also worth noting that the whole steem platform on the currency end of things is completely centralized, so if that matters to you, this is important to know.
- mmjaa 9y ago
  >whales Thus, the importance of community. We all yearn for a return to the era of community-oriented sites, built by enthusiasts and maintained by the life-force of real people, whose intentions are not commercial in nature but rather community oriented. So, I look forward to the eventual retiring of this heinous term, "whales". It is the community that matters.
  - bringtheaction 9y ago
    For a community whose intentions are not commercial why would they need a crypto currency baked into the voting aspect? In other words, is it reasonable to expect STEEM to not primarily attract those with commercial intentions?
    - mmjaa 9y ago
      Communities engage in forms of exchange. If I were using this to communicate with other members, for example interested in retro computing, it'd be nice to have a way of exchanging hardware with each other, with some kind of economic exchange to fit. Its not unreasonable to give people - no matter whether their intentions are commercial or otherwise - a means of safe exchange of value, without commercialising that exchange. Or, is it?
RileyJames 9y ago
Is it streaming from IPFS directly? Or is d.tube (website) hosting a mirror?
- tcper 9y ago
  seems it using infura.io service
- StreamBright 9y ago
  That would probably not work on customer networks.
- diggan 9y ago
  Looking in the "Network" tab in your favorite browser's developer tool, you can see that the videos are requested from the public IPFS gateways. Example: https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmSDWa2kc2vSpbVBvxswZqcUEFTVPBJQyZyjgjTUQVn1Ta https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmSDWa2kc2vSpbVBvxswZqcUEFTVPBJQyZyjgjT... Disclaimer: I work for Protocol Labs on IPFS
rebuilder 9y ago
So where does the money come from? This might be a question about STEEM more than DTube, but I couldn't figure it out. The DTube FAQ answer for "Where does the money come from" just says "The STEEM blockchain keeps printing new STEEM everyday. These new printed STEEM are given out as rewards." I'm hoping there's more to it than that, but I couldn't find what the mechanism for bringing value into the STEEM ecosystem is. As far as I can tell, users of DTube don't pay anything to watch videos, or to comment, or to like videos, but their likes determine who gets paid on the STEEM blockchain. So who buys STEEM tokens and why?
- chippy 9y ago
  edit: https://steemit.com/faq.html#How_does_Steemit_work https://steemit.com/faq.html#How_does_Steemit_work might be better. "Every day, the Steem blockchain mints new STEEM tokens and adds them to a community's "rewards pool". These tokens are then awarded to users for their contributions, based on the votes that their content receives. Users who hold more tokens in their account as "Steem Power" will get to decide where a larger portion of the rewards pool is distributed."
- hobofan 9y ago
  Advertisers (in the long term) In order to have visible advertised content, advertisers need to buy STEEM in order to vote on it and gain visibility.
- unreal37 9y ago
  People are buying STEEM using Bitcoin to gain attraction to their content. Ads basically. Imagine if Facebook used a crypto for their ads instead of money. And you gain money back from people who like your ad making the ad cheaper or even profitable.
- heimindanger 9y ago
  Holding STEEM currency will give you more influence on the network (increase the $ ouput of your votes). A fresh account will give like 0.002 per vote, while my account with 5000 Steem gives about 2$ per vote. Also, people who vote get 'curation rewards' from the system. Depending on how early you voted and helped discovered a content, you get rewarded for it, even if it's only a small share, it adds up
rrcaptain 9y ago
Would this not run into the copyright issues most other distributed hosting networks run into? Especially since it allows directly monetizing the content.
- 7ero 9y ago
  Most likely, it will. But since it's decentralized, it would be hard to enforce copyright.
  - viraptor 9y ago
    Probably not that hard. IPFS is not explicitly trying to hide your traffic. If you're seeding copyrighted content, your ISP can be sent whatever the country-supported legal papers are needed to punish you.
- corobo 9y ago
  Copyright issues are the easy end of the problem stick too. I'm going to straight up ask - what happens when a child porn ring starts using this?
  - 52-6F-62 9y ago
    It appears to already be a home to some fringe stuff. "Big cities are like financial slave camps - Take a break at the Zenvow Meditation Resort - All crypto Meditation Resort in Portugal" (of course this is crazy, but harmless—at least initially) I would also like to know what solution has been proposed for that problem.
  - Pavitra 9y ago
    IPFS supports censorship, theoretically.
sschueller 9y ago
Also checkout peertube which is also federated but doesn't run on IPFS: https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube
- mrschwabe 9y ago
  Another one is bitchute.com
  - Pavitra 9y ago
    For the lazy: https://bitchute.com/ https://bitchute.com/
- maeln 9y ago
  Also PeerTube is not tied to a CryptoCurrency and doesn't try to solve the problem of remuneration of the content producer. It's a strictly technical solution to the problem of video hosting centralization. Depending on your point of view it might be a good, bad or neutral thing. In my opinion, it's good that we first try to have a solution that is first proven to work and then try to think about how (or if we should) integrate a remuneration system to the solution.
jwildeboer 9y ago
Interesting idea, but unfortunately (and as expected) full of antisemitic and „new world order“ conspiracy stuff by people that claim YouTube is censoring them.
- Kequc 9y ago
  Why is this a bad thing, let people post what they want to. Also if someone says YouTube is censoring them why wouldn't you believe it?
  - viraptor 9y ago
    It's likely to forever remain a niche for that kind of content only. What reasonable person would say: "I know, I'll host my video on that website which opens with a list of conspiracy videos and has antisemitism promoted in the sidebar next to my content/face." (And even more - which popular company would do that?)
    - hobofan 9y ago
      If there are enough benefits to the platform and semi-popular (likeable) Youtubers switch to it, the problem should resolve itself after a few days. Luckily antisemites etc. are a minority of the population and can be easily outnumbered.
      - simonh 9y ago
        That's a really big IF, and semi-popular Youtubers have even more to lose from association with the existing content on there than most of us.
        hobofan 9y ago
        I think the question is if the risk of very loose association with that content is higher than the risk of loosing out on revenue by arbitrary decisions from Youtube. Given what happend over the last year with the Adpocalypse, most of them realized that being at the whim of Youtube is a real risk, and are now looking to diverisfy their income streams (see growth of Patreon).
kalendos 9y ago
I like the idea and would love to try it! I have one small concern though. Since the incentive (money) is given to popular videos, why people should post unpopular opinions in Stemmit or videos in Dtube? That is, if I upload a video of a cat doing some funny thing I'll get more tokens (potentially) that with a super technical video.
- tzfld 9y ago
  Isn't the same thing as on Youtube? You get more views, get more money.
- simonh 9y ago
  Having a platform that incentivizes popular content should in theory attract popular content to the platform. This should attract viewers to the platform, thus increasing the viewership available to see your less popular content. Meanwhile, incentivizing popular stuff doesn't take anything away from you or your content. You're not being penalised, so why complain?
  - kalendos 9y ago
    > Having a platform that incentivizes popular content should in theory attract popular content to the platform. This should attract viewers to the platform, thus increasing the viewership available to see your less popular content. Thanks for pointing that! I didn't though of it this way. To be honest, my fear is that this platform could turn possibly in some sort of niche. Right now, popular content is about X, so if I want to make quick profits, I'll create a video about X. More people will join and do the same. I'm sure there are ways to fix that like giving people incentives for posting in unpopular topics. Potentially, each topic could be its own market! > You're not being penalised, so why complain? Not complaining at all for now. Just sharing my current thoughts! If I join a social media, I'd love to have diversity of content and opinion. I think in STEEM that could be hard, as it is in Reddit unless you subscribe to unpopular ones. Not a 100% bad thing though!
TekMol 9y ago
Ok, so I'm looking at a website that tells me it's decentralized. But from all I can tell this is just a good old website. Somebody has control over the domain name. Points it to servers of his choice. And the servers deliver content of his choice. What's decentralized about it?
- hobofan 9y ago
  Yup, DTube, like most projects related to STEEM still have a high degree of centralization. This reddit comment gives a good evaluation of DTube: https://www.reddit.com/r/dtube/comments/7ysdn1/how_distributed_is_dtube/dujaxpi/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dtube/comments/7ysdn1/how_distribut... So most parts of it could at their core be used in a distributed fashion, but are actually accessed via CDNs. E.g. you could use ipfs-companion[0] to alter all instances of ipfs.io URLs to point to a local IPFS daemon that is connected to the IPFS network in a distributed fashion. I did just that and streamed a video on DTube via a local IPFS daemon and the result was pretty underwhelming, since it took quite some time for the video to load, but I don't dare to evaluate why that is so. After that it does have the nice benefit though that the same video streams instantly on any other machine in my home network! In a transitional phase to a distributed web I'd expect a lot of websites to employ a similar approach of using CDNs at first (since not everybode has local nodes running), but its sad to see that some of the flagship projects like DTube aren't even open source (and I have no idea if they ever plan to be) and/or have a distributed version available. [0]: https://github.com/ipfs-shipyard/ipfs-companion https://github.com/ipfs-shipyard/ipfs-companion
  - arghwhat 9y ago
    This solution might make a lot of sense as a build-up process. However, until DTube release a client so that the network can build, it's just a centralized video platform using IPFS and STEEM as storage backends. Unless clients are made available, it might as well use S3 and Postgres.
    - TekMol 9y ago
      If it uses IPFS as a storage backend, then why is it faster to watch the video on the website then via IPFS as hobofan did? This seems to be an indication they store that data on a server all the time.
kaolti 9y ago
It amazes me how skilled we are in pointing out what is wrong with something.
- exodust 9y ago
  The site doesn't work for me at all, just a blank white page. No skill involved in mentioning that.
- gkya 9y ago
  Well right things need no fixing, so pointing out wrong things is more useful.
ekzy 9y ago
I don't think scrolling on the video to change the volume is a good idea. I jumped because the volume of the video suddenly changed as I was trying to get around.
l2dy 9y ago
https://about.d.tube/ https://about.d.tube/ - A landing page presenting and explaining DTube https://github.com/dtube https://github.com/dtube
YTGRK 9y ago
https://youtu.be/XSpOTUKz3Ys https://youtu.be/XSpOTUKz3Ys
xstartup 9y ago
I wonder if IPFS can be connected to Cloudflare such that CF ends up acting like a CDN for IPFS network. The content is encrypted (so that the CF does not know what's being served) and users can offer their own Cloudflare API keys to take part in the network. Edit: Please tell me why the downvotes.
- ryukafalz 9y ago
  You're likely being downvoted because IPFS is already effectively a decentralized CDN. By adding CloudFlare in the mix, you've just re-centralized it - in other words, you've defeated the entire purpose of the platform.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
tw1010 9y ago
Cool project! But I have a hard time shaking the feeling that a lot of the content and comments are bots or are paid for.
- erikig 9y ago
  Most new social networks suffer from this issue early on, the only solution is mass adoption and curation which the STEEM seems to be working toward.
acobster 9y ago
This is really exciting and has a lot of potential. The pause button is broken on Android Firefox, though. :)
charles_ghost 9y ago
This is real good work.
harlanji 9y ago
Good stuff. I posted some technical videos about DTube/IPFS vs. HLS+CDN in the past few days (2x 20min), and design lectures in the past 90 or so days (2-3x50min)... I forget etiquitte about posting links but my profile has some pointers and I use this handle widely on the web. Highly recommend if DTube is of interest (unscripted+uncut, I rewatch them a few times for myself but share).
g-b-r 9y ago
https://decentralize.today/the-ugly-truth-behind-steemit-1a525f5e156 https://decentralize.today/the-ugly-truth-behind-steemit-1a5... It's rather old (2016-08) but at a quick glance it appears to be correct and still relevant.
leke 9y ago
Wow, this is amazing. I think this is a YouTube killer for sure. I'm just waiting for my account to be accepted. Just one request. I love the YouTube JKL control keys. Any chance you could implement this on D-Tube?
wazoox 9y ago
How does it compare to Peertube? https://peertube.cpy.re/ https://peertube.cpy.re/ Ah I see, DTube is based upon IPFS, while peertube relies upon good ol' BitTorrent directly (though IPFS uses BitTorrent too?)
- Quiark 9y ago
  ipfs is a new protocol which happens to do similar things to bittorrent. For simplicity you can think of it as bittorrent with folders
avuton 9y ago
How is abusive content handled on this platform?
- Pavitra 9y ago
  Users can downvote.
dom96 9y ago
So this is pretty amazing. But how in the world are they going to survive the obvious issues such as copyright violations?
- Miner49er 9y ago
  Isn't that the point behind this? It can't be censored. You don't do anything, because you can't do anything.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
JankySolutions 9y ago
Wow, nice domain. I wonder how much that cost
- heimindanger 9y ago
  Actually we started out with dtube.video domain and the .TUBE registry owner noticed and liked our project so much that he offered the domain for a very fair price. :)) True story
  - JankySolutions 9y ago
    wow, very cool.
JaimeThompson 9y ago
What steps are being done to combat the doxing of individualists on DTube? DTube doesn't have much of a mainstream future if it becomes a haven for people harassing others / posting their personal information.
- heimindanger 9y ago
  I believe the same applies to steemit.com. Well once something gets written on the blockchain, it's hard to remove it. The DTube domain (that we control) would always be able to block certain videos in extreme cases, but the videos would still be on IPFS. And there isn't much we can do about that, it's the same case as when someone gets seeded on torrent. You can find the nodes seeding a particular content by doing ipfs dht findprovs <hash> , then you get their ips and you go after them legally.
throw7 9y ago
please make making an account easier. not going to give a phone number. email is easier to bypass.
KyleBerezin 9y ago
I've been wondering for a long time, how do you remove illegal content. I don't care so much about copyright and minor offenses like that, but more serious offenses like child pornography. If there is no way to remove it, people and governments will start to take action against the whole website, decentralized or not.
vijaybritto 9y ago
Just went through the html to figure out the js library that they used but instead found a lot of elements having the same id's in the page. Looks like the frontend was hastily written to make it just work.
rijoja 9y ago
I've had a sense that something like this would be the future. However for the less up to par with cutting edge web technologies, how about a single page that in a condense manner describes the technology behind this? Even for a person somewhat up to date with distributed technologies it takes at least an hour to understand exactly what's going on. Again not trying to be harsh, but I feel that the UI, in this stages looks a little bit too much like youtube, giving it a cheap feel, that makes it a bit hard to sell to "normal" people. And oh, I feel that having three decimals on the earnings looks a bit weird to me. Isn't two decimals enough? Say $116.688 is hard for my brain to parse either it's 116 dollars and 68.8 cents or maybe it's around 1 million dollars???
no_news_is 9y ago
It rubs me wrong that anonyhack is reposting videos from YouTube and claiming credit for them, in cryptocurrency and STEEM: https://d.tube/#!/v/anonyhack/3w9xsp8j https://d.tube/#!/v/anonyhack/3w9xsp8j https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEBWtbhq0Ts https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEBWtbhq0Ts Can anything be done to prevent or deter this? Other than maybe leaving comments on the page?

558 points by WhiteRiceWill 9y ago

gigatexal 9y ago

The cash amount by each video mean what?

thecatspaw 9y ago
thats what the users earned by getting liked by other users
- dayaz36 9y ago
  cumulatively or is that how much they're earning per month?
  - drdeca 9y ago
    My impression is that it is all within the first 20 days after posting, but I haven't looked into it closely and could easily be remembering incorrectly or have misunderstood.
  - mtgx 9y ago
    It's how much they've earned for that particular video so far. I've been saying it for a while here but nobody seemed to listen. d.tube is way better for smaller creators than YouTube is right now, and with a tiny fraction of YouTube's audience. Plus, YouTube is only going to get worse for small creators, as Google tries to cater more and more to the big companies and punish the creators for "advertiser-offensive content". Meanwhile, d.tube should get better and better as both it and STEEM (the tipping mechanism) rise in popularity. The nice part is the creators don't even have to give-up YouTube to try out d.tube. They can just upload the video to both and see for themselves what's the difference.
    - stctgion 9y ago
      With a new monetised platform, with money being incredibly obvious on the UI, the incentive is pretty high to just steal popular content from YouTube and repost it. How do they ensure original content or ownership?
      - rrcaptain 9y ago
        They don't. People are going to get screwed and sued over this.
      - slimshady94 9y ago
        Automated AI algorithms, some day.
        weego 9y ago
        how is an "AI algorithm" going to figure out a newly uploaded video is a dupe of a Youtube video that is in the process of trending? How would you effectively contentID every single popular video on Youtube and run it against a fully distributed video platform? Just magical AI things I guess?
        j0hnM1st 9y ago
        contentID sort of thing is actually possible - I am actually working on a proof of concept AI bot to identify spam and plagiarism. some basic info is here : https://steemit.com/hello/@thefreebird/init-1 https://steemit.com/hello/@thefreebird/init-1
      - yAnonymous 9y ago
        If Facebook doesn't care about enforcing copyright, why should such a small website? That really seems like an argument that is made only to hurt startups.
        thecatspaw 9y ago
        > That really seems like an argument that is made only to hurt startups. you're looking at this the wrong way. Yes, startups should enforce copyright. But so should facebook. They just get away with it because they are big
  - nafest 9y ago
    You can only earn the first seven days after the post was created.
    - Tepix 9y ago
      If you create something that has a lasting appeal you should repost it every X days.. Sounds dumb.
- jerguismi 9y ago
  How liquid are those earnings? Can they be withdrawn easily and converted to BTC/USD?
  - RandomInteger4 9y ago
    The earnings are in the form of Steem Power, Steem,and steem dollars. The latter was apparently an attempt to make a stable currency, which tracked the dollar, which failed to live up to its goals. Steem power is very illiquid and takes time to "power down" the steem power into steem. Steem is the main currency, which you trade on the markets (along with Steem dollars).
  - sneak 9y ago
    Yes, although about 50% of the payout amount in the default case is in the form of Steem Power, which takes ~12 weeks to convert to STEEM which can be instantly traded like any other coin. Delay aside, it’s all the author’s.
erikig 9y ago
The same payout model is implemented on https://steemit.com https://steemit.com - take a look there as well.

forkLding 9y ago

Can there be a general explanation for what all the things including the cash symbols mean and how all the videos sourced from (like using IPFS) if its not too privately protected? Much thanks! EDIT: Nevermind, found it, link below: https://steemit.com/video/@heimindanger/introducing-dtube-a-decentralized-video-platform-using-steem-and-ipfs https://steemit.com/video/@heimindanger/introducing-dtube-a-...

dvddgld 9y ago
Thanks for the link

jzebedee 9y ago

If you're not familiar with STEEM or its currency, you can check the FAQ. [1] [1] https://steemit.com/faq.html#What_is_the_difference_between_STEEM__STEEM_Power__and_Steem_Dollars https://steemit.com/faq.html#What_is_the_difference_between_...

RandomInteger4 9y ago

Steem looked like an interesting idea, but your content lives and dies with the platform's whales, which are either insiders or a few people who believe in the platform. If the whales don't interact with your content, you're not likely to get much revenue. You voting power -- the amount you contribute to content you interact with -- is directly tied to your steem power, so unless you put money into the platform or managed to make money and kept it in the platform, you're not going to contribute much. Similarly, as a user, contributing upvotes, comments, etc. nets you a curation reward, but this comes in trickles mostly unless you lease your steem power to vote bots. Also worth noting that the whole steem platform on the currency end of things is completely centralized, so if that matters to you, this is important to know.

mmjaa 9y ago
>whales Thus, the importance of community. We all yearn for a return to the era of community-oriented sites, built by enthusiasts and maintained by the life-force of real people, whose intentions are not commercial in nature but rather community oriented. So, I look forward to the eventual retiring of this heinous term, "whales". It is the community that matters.
- bringtheaction 9y ago
  For a community whose intentions are not commercial why would they need a crypto currency baked into the voting aspect? In other words, is it reasonable to expect STEEM to not primarily attract those with commercial intentions?
  - mmjaa 9y ago
    Communities engage in forms of exchange. If I were using this to communicate with other members, for example interested in retro computing, it'd be nice to have a way of exchanging hardware with each other, with some kind of economic exchange to fit. Its not unreasonable to give people - no matter whether their intentions are commercial or otherwise - a means of safe exchange of value, without commercialising that exchange. Or, is it?

RileyJames 9y ago

Is it streaming from IPFS directly? Or is d.tube (website) hosting a mirror?

tcper 9y ago
seems it using infura.io service
StreamBright 9y ago
That would probably not work on customer networks.
diggan 9y ago
Looking in the "Network" tab in your favorite browser's developer tool, you can see that the videos are requested from the public IPFS gateways. Example: https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmSDWa2kc2vSpbVBvxswZqcUEFTVPBJQyZyjgjTUQVn1Ta https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmSDWa2kc2vSpbVBvxswZqcUEFTVPBJQyZyjgjT... Disclaimer: I work for Protocol Labs on IPFS

rebuilder 9y ago

So where does the money come from? This might be a question about STEEM more than DTube, but I couldn't figure it out. The DTube FAQ answer for "Where does the money come from" just says "The STEEM blockchain keeps printing new STEEM everyday. These new printed STEEM are given out as rewards." I'm hoping there's more to it than that, but I couldn't find what the mechanism for bringing value into the STEEM ecosystem is. As far as I can tell, users of DTube don't pay anything to watch videos, or to comment, or to like videos, but their likes determine who gets paid on the STEEM blockchain. So who buys STEEM tokens and why?

chippy 9y ago
edit: https://steemit.com/faq.html#How_does_Steemit_work https://steemit.com/faq.html#How_does_Steemit_work might be better. "Every day, the Steem blockchain mints new STEEM tokens and adds them to a community's "rewards pool". These tokens are then awarded to users for their contributions, based on the votes that their content receives. Users who hold more tokens in their account as "Steem Power" will get to decide where a larger portion of the rewards pool is distributed."
hobofan 9y ago
Advertisers (in the long term) In order to have visible advertised content, advertisers need to buy STEEM in order to vote on it and gain visibility.
unreal37 9y ago
People are buying STEEM using Bitcoin to gain attraction to their content. Ads basically. Imagine if Facebook used a crypto for their ads instead of money. And you gain money back from people who like your ad making the ad cheaper or even profitable.
heimindanger 9y ago
Holding STEEM currency will give you more influence on the network (increase the $ ouput of your votes). A fresh account will give like 0.002 per vote, while my account with 5000 Steem gives about 2$ per vote. Also, people who vote get 'curation rewards' from the system. Depending on how early you voted and helped discovered a content, you get rewarded for it, even if it's only a small share, it adds up

rrcaptain 9y ago

Would this not run into the copyright issues most other distributed hosting networks run into? Especially since it allows directly monetizing the content.

7ero 9y ago
Most likely, it will. But since it's decentralized, it would be hard to enforce copyright.
- viraptor 9y ago
  Probably not that hard. IPFS is not explicitly trying to hide your traffic. If you're seeding copyrighted content, your ISP can be sent whatever the country-supported legal papers are needed to punish you.
corobo 9y ago
Copyright issues are the easy end of the problem stick too. I'm going to straight up ask - what happens when a child porn ring starts using this?
- 52-6F-62 9y ago
  It appears to already be a home to some fringe stuff. "Big cities are like financial slave camps - Take a break at the Zenvow Meditation Resort - All crypto Meditation Resort in Portugal" (of course this is crazy, but harmless—at least initially) I would also like to know what solution has been proposed for that problem.
- Pavitra 9y ago
  IPFS supports censorship, theoretically.

sschueller 9y ago

Also checkout peertube which is also federated but doesn't run on IPFS: https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube

mrschwabe 9y ago
Another one is bitchute.com
- Pavitra 9y ago
  For the lazy: https://bitchute.com/ https://bitchute.com/
maeln 9y ago
Also PeerTube is not tied to a CryptoCurrency and doesn't try to solve the problem of remuneration of the content producer. It's a strictly technical solution to the problem of video hosting centralization. Depending on your point of view it might be a good, bad or neutral thing. In my opinion, it's good that we first try to have a solution that is first proven to work and then try to think about how (or if we should) integrate a remuneration system to the solution.

jwildeboer 9y ago

Interesting idea, but unfortunately (and as expected) full of antisemitic and „new world order“ conspiracy stuff by people that claim YouTube is censoring them.

Kequc 9y ago
Why is this a bad thing, let people post what they want to. Also if someone says YouTube is censoring them why wouldn't you believe it?
- viraptor 9y ago
  It's likely to forever remain a niche for that kind of content only. What reasonable person would say: "I know, I'll host my video on that website which opens with a list of conspiracy videos and has antisemitism promoted in the sidebar next to my content/face." (And even more - which popular company would do that?)
  - hobofan 9y ago
    If there are enough benefits to the platform and semi-popular (likeable) Youtubers switch to it, the problem should resolve itself after a few days. Luckily antisemites etc. are a minority of the population and can be easily outnumbered.
    - simonh 9y ago
      That's a really big IF, and semi-popular Youtubers have even more to lose from association with the existing content on there than most of us.
      - hobofan 9y ago
        I think the question is if the risk of very loose association with that content is higher than the risk of loosing out on revenue by arbitrary decisions from Youtube. Given what happend over the last year with the Adpocalypse, most of them realized that being at the whim of Youtube is a real risk, and are now looking to diverisfy their income streams (see growth of Patreon).

kalendos 9y ago

I like the idea and would love to try it! I have one small concern though. Since the incentive (money) is given to popular videos, why people should post unpopular opinions in Stemmit or videos in Dtube? That is, if I upload a video of a cat doing some funny thing I'll get more tokens (potentially) that with a super technical video.

tzfld 9y ago
Isn't the same thing as on Youtube? You get more views, get more money.
simonh 9y ago
Having a platform that incentivizes popular content should in theory attract popular content to the platform. This should attract viewers to the platform, thus increasing the viewership available to see your less popular content. Meanwhile, incentivizing popular stuff doesn't take anything away from you or your content. You're not being penalised, so why complain?
- kalendos 9y ago
  > Having a platform that incentivizes popular content should in theory attract popular content to the platform. This should attract viewers to the platform, thus increasing the viewership available to see your less popular content. Thanks for pointing that! I didn't though of it this way. To be honest, my fear is that this platform could turn possibly in some sort of niche. Right now, popular content is about X, so if I want to make quick profits, I'll create a video about X. More people will join and do the same. I'm sure there are ways to fix that like giving people incentives for posting in unpopular topics. Potentially, each topic could be its own market! > You're not being penalised, so why complain? Not complaining at all for now. Just sharing my current thoughts! If I join a social media, I'd love to have diversity of content and opinion. I think in STEEM that could be hard, as it is in Reddit unless you subscribe to unpopular ones. Not a 100% bad thing though!

TekMol 9y ago

Ok, so I'm looking at a website that tells me it's decentralized. But from all I can tell this is just a good old website. Somebody has control over the domain name. Points it to servers of his choice. And the servers deliver content of his choice. What's decentralized about it?

hobofan 9y ago
Yup, DTube, like most projects related to STEEM still have a high degree of centralization. This reddit comment gives a good evaluation of DTube: https://www.reddit.com/r/dtube/comments/7ysdn1/how_distributed_is_dtube/dujaxpi/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dtube/comments/7ysdn1/how_distribut... So most parts of it could at their core be used in a distributed fashion, but are actually accessed via CDNs. E.g. you could use ipfs-companion[0] to alter all instances of ipfs.io URLs to point to a local IPFS daemon that is connected to the IPFS network in a distributed fashion. I did just that and streamed a video on DTube via a local IPFS daemon and the result was pretty underwhelming, since it took quite some time for the video to load, but I don't dare to evaluate why that is so. After that it does have the nice benefit though that the same video streams instantly on any other machine in my home network! In a transitional phase to a distributed web I'd expect a lot of websites to employ a similar approach of using CDNs at first (since not everybode has local nodes running), but its sad to see that some of the flagship projects like DTube aren't even open source (and I have no idea if they ever plan to be) and/or have a distributed version available. [0]: https://github.com/ipfs-shipyard/ipfs-companion https://github.com/ipfs-shipyard/ipfs-companion
- arghwhat 9y ago
  This solution might make a lot of sense as a build-up process. However, until DTube release a client so that the network can build, it's just a centralized video platform using IPFS and STEEM as storage backends. Unless clients are made available, it might as well use S3 and Postgres.
  - TekMol 9y ago
    If it uses IPFS as a storage backend, then why is it faster to watch the video on the website then via IPFS as hobofan did? This seems to be an indication they store that data on a server all the time.

kaolti 9y ago

It amazes me how skilled we are in pointing out what is wrong with something.

exodust 9y ago
The site doesn't work for me at all, just a blank white page. No skill involved in mentioning that.
gkya 9y ago
Well right things need no fixing, so pointing out wrong things is more useful.

ekzy 9y ago

I don't think scrolling on the video to change the volume is a good idea. I jumped because the volume of the video suddenly changed as I was trying to get around.

l2dy 9y ago

https://about.d.tube/ https://about.d.tube/ - A landing page presenting and explaining DTube https://github.com/dtube https://github.com/dtube

YTGRK 9y ago

https://youtu.be/XSpOTUKz3Ys https://youtu.be/XSpOTUKz3Ys

xstartup 9y ago

I wonder if IPFS can be connected to Cloudflare such that CF ends up acting like a CDN for IPFS network. The content is encrypted (so that the CF does not know what's being served) and users can offer their own Cloudflare API keys to take part in the network. Edit: Please tell me why the downvotes.

ryukafalz 9y ago
You're likely being downvoted because IPFS is already effectively a decentralized CDN. By adding CloudFlare in the mix, you've just re-centralized it - in other words, you've defeated the entire purpose of the platform.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

tw1010 9y ago

Cool project! But I have a hard time shaking the feeling that a lot of the content and comments are bots or are paid for.

erikig 9y ago
Most new social networks suffer from this issue early on, the only solution is mass adoption and curation which the STEEM seems to be working toward.

acobster 9y ago

This is really exciting and has a lot of potential. The pause button is broken on Android Firefox, though. :)

charles_ghost 9y ago

This is real good work.

harlanji 9y ago

Good stuff. I posted some technical videos about DTube/IPFS vs. HLS+CDN in the past few days (2x 20min), and design lectures in the past 90 or so days (2-3x50min)... I forget etiquitte about posting links but my profile has some pointers and I use this handle widely on the web. Highly recommend if DTube is of interest (unscripted+uncut, I rewatch them a few times for myself but share).

g-b-r 9y ago

https://decentralize.today/the-ugly-truth-behind-steemit-1a525f5e156 https://decentralize.today/the-ugly-truth-behind-steemit-1a5... It's rather old (2016-08) but at a quick glance it appears to be correct and still relevant.

leke 9y ago

Wow, this is amazing. I think this is a YouTube killer for sure. I'm just waiting for my account to be accepted. Just one request. I love the YouTube JKL control keys. Any chance you could implement this on D-Tube?

wazoox 9y ago

How does it compare to Peertube? https://peertube.cpy.re/ https://peertube.cpy.re/ Ah I see, DTube is based upon IPFS, while peertube relies upon good ol' BitTorrent directly (though IPFS uses BitTorrent too?)

Quiark 9y ago
ipfs is a new protocol which happens to do similar things to bittorrent. For simplicity you can think of it as bittorrent with folders

avuton 9y ago

How is abusive content handled on this platform?

Pavitra 9y ago
Users can downvote.

dom96 9y ago

So this is pretty amazing. But how in the world are they going to survive the obvious issues such as copyright violations?

Miner49er 9y ago
Isn't that the point behind this? It can't be censored. You don't do anything, because you can't do anything.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

JankySolutions 9y ago

Wow, nice domain. I wonder how much that cost

heimindanger 9y ago
Actually we started out with dtube.video domain and the .TUBE registry owner noticed and liked our project so much that he offered the domain for a very fair price. :)) True story
- JankySolutions 9y ago
  wow, very cool.

JaimeThompson 9y ago

What steps are being done to combat the doxing of individualists on DTube? DTube doesn't have much of a mainstream future if it becomes a haven for people harassing others / posting their personal information.

heimindanger 9y ago
I believe the same applies to steemit.com. Well once something gets written on the blockchain, it's hard to remove it. The DTube domain (that we control) would always be able to block certain videos in extreme cases, but the videos would still be on IPFS. And there isn't much we can do about that, it's the same case as when someone gets seeded on torrent. You can find the nodes seeding a particular content by doing ipfs dht findprovs <hash> , then you get their ips and you go after them legally.

throw7 9y ago

please make making an account easier. not going to give a phone number. email is easier to bypass.

KyleBerezin 9y ago

I've been wondering for a long time, how do you remove illegal content. I don't care so much about copyright and minor offenses like that, but more serious offenses like child pornography. If there is no way to remove it, people and governments will start to take action against the whole website, decentralized or not.

vijaybritto 9y ago

Just went through the html to figure out the js library that they used but instead found a lot of elements having the same id's in the page. Looks like the frontend was hastily written to make it just work.

rijoja 9y ago

I've had a sense that something like this would be the future. However for the less up to par with cutting edge web technologies, how about a single page that in a condense manner describes the technology behind this? Even for a person somewhat up to date with distributed technologies it takes at least an hour to understand exactly what's going on. Again not trying to be harsh, but I feel that the UI, in this stages looks a little bit too much like youtube, giving it a cheap feel, that makes it a bit hard to sell to "normal" people. And oh, I feel that having three decimals on the earnings looks a bit weird to me. Isn't two decimals enough? Say $116.688 is hard for my brain to parse either it's 116 dollars and 68.8 cents or maybe it's around 1 million dollars???

no_news_is 9y ago

It rubs me wrong that anonyhack is reposting videos from YouTube and claiming credit for them, in cryptocurrency and STEEM: https://d.tube/#!/v/anonyhack/3w9xsp8j https://d.tube/#!/v/anonyhack/3w9xsp8j https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEBWtbhq0Ts https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEBWtbhq0Ts Can anything be done to prevent or deter this? Other than maybe leaving comments on the page?