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I don't understand the economics of this at all. Video distribution is bandwidth heavy. If you're running your own peer tube instance the server costs are surel

I don't understand the economics of this at all. Video distribution is bandwidth heavy. If you're running your own peer tube instance the server costs are surely going to outstrip any revenue you make from it. if users have to carry that load and seed your stuff they'll have to waste their own storage. What is the incentive for anyone to do this? Exacerbated by the fact that the entire thing mostly seems to attract people who get banned from anything else so the content isn't even going to attract advertisers.

throwuxiytayq 5y ago
And yet, torrents are still a thing.
- Barrin92 5y ago
  because people want to download illegal movies and porn, or host linux isos as a service for the commons. There's practically no commercial activity around torrents because it's an incredibly inefficient way to serve large amounts of data.
  - gtirloni 5y ago
    How's it inefficient?
    - Barrin92 5y ago
      because decentralized systems need to redundantly store data, a lot. Youtube accounts for, depending on the source 15% of global internet traffic. The reason you can watch videos at 1080p wherever you are in the world buffer free is because the system is ridiculously optimized, cached locally, and so on. Do you want to go back to 180p because one of the two guys hosting that five year old video with 50k views you liked just went offline?
      - gtirloni 5y ago
        Your second paragraph disproves your first, do you realize that? Youtube caches locally in a decentralized fashion, with redundant data, etc.
  - zuminator 5y ago
    Legal or not, the fact that many people host and share dozens of large torrents from their home servers for free belies the claim that sharing video would necessarily be too expensive to be practical or would devolve back to turn off the century RealVideo quality.
    - Barrin92 5y ago
      the legality matters a great deal because if you steal the IP obviously even cumbersome technology becomes viable. Cartels don't use drug mules because they're such a fantastic feat of logistics but because hiring a freight train is somewhat problematic
  - vadfa 5y ago
    Blizzard used to distribute updates using bittorrent before the advent of CDNs.
    - SilverRed 5y ago
      Everyone used to but almost no company does anymore. It's easier and more effective to just let each ISP cache the content of highly downloaded files.
      - kragen 5y ago
        You mean, pay Fastly or Cloudflare to run your swarm for you, instead of running it yourself on your users' computers?
        SilverRed 5y ago
        Which isn't too expensive if you have paying customers. Doesn't make people angry when they are on data cap or trying to do something else on their network. Also doesn't have to deal with endless NAT and middlebox issues. But often ISPs will willingly host the content for free since it saves them money as well. Steam and netflix have caches inside ISP datacenters.
    - kragen 5y ago
      To be totally fair, Akamai predates BitTorrent.
  - ekianjo 5y ago
    > illegal movies What's illegal movies?
    - kragen 5y ago
      Maybe Barrin92 is in the People's Republic of China, where movies criticizing the government are illegal.
    - 1MachineElf 5y ago
      Here's an example of a movie declared illegal in the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magnitsky_Act_%E2%80%93_Behind_the_Scenes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magnitsky_Act_%E2%80%93_Be...
      - mastax 5y ago
        The Wikipedia article doesn't mention any banning, and I can buy the film on Amazon.
  - kragen 5y ago
    You may not be aware of this, but like everything on PeerTube, the video we are commenting on here is in fact served up via BitTorrent. I got about a third of it from the diode.zone seed, which, if I understand correctly, is paid for out of Micah Scott's Patreon. The inefficiency of torrents on near-symmetric internet connections is pretty minor. If a 1GiB movie is on Netflix, each user has to download 1GiB of data over your internet connection. If it's in a torrent, each user has to download 1GiB of data and also upload 1GiB of data. The efficiency difference is only a factor of 2. And the 1GiB of upload bandwidth was, in many cases, idle anyway. (Well, there's also the fact that the users are paying the cost of distributing the movie, rather than Netflix paying part of it. So you'd think that information that benefits the people who receive it, like Linux, porn, and sewing and soapmaking tutorials, rather than the people who produce it, like advertising, would tend to be distributed by torrents. But, for a commercial setup, this is a minor consideration; even ordinary hosted servers pay relatively little for bandwidth, and Netflix probably pays nothing in most cases. I suspect Micah Scott ended up paying about 10% of the cost of me watching this video, not counting the value of my time.)
    - leothecool 5y ago
      So... if I watch a copywritten video on peertube, the MPAA might sue me for being a peer and distributing it?
      - valdiorn 5y ago
        This is actually a really important question that we need an answer to.
  - DocTomoe 5y ago
    IIRC, both Windows Updates as well as Steam use delivery systems that are very similar to torrents.
pacifist 5y ago
Why would you want advertisers? Advertisers are part of the problem.
- cirenehc 5y ago
  A significant portion of content creators do it as a full time job. Ads is a stable revenue stream for these content creators. You as a consumer are free to move to any decentralized video platform you like, but the main bottleneck for any significant shift in market share depends on content creators, and ultimately, on advertisers.
  - jcims 5y ago
    How much would I have to pay to replace the revenue that a content creater would get from my eyeball traffic on YouTube? From what I'm reading it's less than a penny per video. I send about $30/mo to Patreon, that's enough for what, 3000 videos? I watch YouTube way too much, but I don't watch it that much. Realistically I should be aiming to replace Google's revenue for my eyeball traffic, because that covers all of the costs as well. Still seems very doable. It would be nice if Patreon partnered up with them and handled the transactions.
    - themacguffinman 5y ago
      Realistically, every PeerTube viewer would also need to pay for the thousands or more viewers any creator will lose by forcing viewers to pay money and by moving to a niche platform with worse UX and no serious discovery.
    - serverholic 5y ago
      That really puts it into perspective. If we each chipped in one penny per video we could replace advertisements for everyone. At least in terms of supporting the content creators.
      - chii 5y ago
        How many videos do you watch per day? If you're anything like me, i at least skim through 100 videos a day. Likely more, depending on my free time and interest. That's like 1-2 dollars worth of 'penny' donations per day. I'm not sure i would be willing to pay that, esp. if for videos that i'm only mildly interested in, and would not have gone to watch if it weren't free.
zelphirkalt 5y ago
That's the thing: It doesn't have to pay off and it doesn't have to generate revenue. That's not its goal. It is not a business model. If we want good content und independence from YouTube, perhaps it is time to see, that it might cost us a tiny bit of money each month, to uphold our freedom. One rented server can easily support many users, each of those can chip in to finance renting the server. It can be done transparently, so that users always know what they are paying for and how much is covered already for the month. It is time to learn, that we need to support what we like financially, so that people can actually live from providing us with it. As long as we do not do so, people can only provide us with their creations by generating revenue in other ways.
- mattl 5y ago
  How do we get good content from a platform that is explicitly copyleft? Will the vast majority of creators use this even as a backup?
  - zelphirkalt 5y ago
    Why would copyleft have anything to do with the quality of content people upload? I am not quite following the connection there.
    - mattl 5y ago
      Most people don’t care about the license of a place to put their videos
      - detaro 5y ago
        Then why did you bring it up at all?
        mattl 5y ago
        It’s literally all over the Peertube homepage
soheil 5y ago
Perhaps efficiency shouldn't be the thing we optimize for in this case. If you look at the internet it's extremely inefficient, there are millions of DNS servers all kind of have semi recent information about domains. There are millions of websites mainly hosted on extremely inefficient servers. There are millions of images and other assets mainly compressed less than they should be wasting tons of bandwidth. Yet here we are, the internet works and it works great. It'd be a sad day if someone argued that we should abandon all this and give the keys to someone like Google? Because it'd be more efficient? Screw that!
- SilverRed 5y ago
  The thing is that dns and static web servers are serving an absolutely minuscule amount of data while a single video on youtube is several GB in the higher qualities. No one can compete on video hosting because it is constantly at the upper limit of what is possible. It will be forever before all videos go 4k and when they do, there will be a push to have it all at 60fps and then at higher bitrates and then at 120fps.
  - foxfluff 5y ago
    Diminishing returns. I think most people would agree that 1Mbps 1080p AV1 looks ok (https://demo.bitmovin.com/public/firefox/av1/ https://demo.bitmovin.com/public/firefox/av1/ -- use the quality selector and wait a while) and the vast majority of "content" doesn't warrant cinema quality anyway. There's always some push for more quality but that doesn't mean the audience requires it. Youtube itself had horrible quality and outdated codecs for a long long time yet and that didn't stop it from getting popular. Video snobs are a bit of a niche that youtube has historically not catered for.
    - SilverRed 5y ago
      As far as I know, youtube has always been pretty close to the top for free video streaming quality. Sites like facebook and such compress the video far more than youtube ever has. So yeah they were not the best video possible to create but they were the best for the internet at the time and still are. You can upload 8k HDR 60fps videos which are sized at multiple GB right now. Once youtube has it, people are not going to tolerate 720p video from an alternative.
belorn 5y ago
There are people who like running their own linux server with their own hardware. Occasionally those people are also interesting in creating videos or have friends/family that are. There are also people who get funded through sites like patreon, who might not care too much for youtube advertisement or YT freemium. Sometimes you even see youtube personalities switching to twitch or other platforms just in order to escape youtube and do legal activity which is just close to impossible on youtube. There is an endless stream of youtube videos complaing about youtube copyright system and how it makes their job close to impossible in some cases. Game reviews and movie reviews are two areas almost dominated by the issue of false copyright claims, which has forced some creators to abandon the platform as a revenue sources. There is even float plane which was designed from the ground to solve the youtube problem, created by a company that fully relied on youtube for its existence. If your company existence is depended on a free service provided by someone else, you might want to reconsider how safe you should feel. PeerTube might serve a similar purpose. On top of that we have scientists who might want to know that their research isn't taken down because of false copyright claims or fleeting politics. A company that has linked instruction videos in their books/teaching material might want to be sure that links still work 10 years from now. Activists might want to avoid the risk that their documentation doesn't go dark from a political requests or false claim. Police brutality victims might want to be sure that the copyrighted music playing in the background, placed there intentionally to get copyright claims, does not stop them from uploading videos.
jjk166 5y ago
The fact is most videos are unpopular, so they don't have a very high bandwidth requirement. Those that do have a high bandwidth requirement are the popular videos that will be seeded by more nodes in the network. Typically this popularity is brief, so as the popularity fades, nodes can switch to hosting other content without a dramatic uptick in bandwidth usage for other nodes. The system works as long as users typically seed approximately the same amount as they leech.
phkahler 5y ago
If distribution is done like bit torrent then the users pay for it - the cost is then distributed and very low. There needs to be some kind of peer to peer rating system so you can find content suited to you (reinforce your bubble I suppose) because there is going to be no central filtering authority, but that's part of the point.
caeril 5y ago
> What is the incentive for anyone to do this? What is the incentive for anyone to run a Tor/i2p/IPFS/Torrent seed node? This is difficult for normies to understand, but money isn't the only thing that incentivizes people to do things. There are many people for whom "Fuck YouTube" is the only incentive required to participate.
- rnd0 5y ago
  >What is the incentive for anyone to run a Tor/i2p/IPFS/Torrent seed node? Work. Usually for a three letter agency of some sort -at least for the first two.
howaboutnope 5y ago
> if users have to carry that load and seed your stuff they'll have to waste their own storage. Waste? They'd be using storage that would otherwise most likely be sitting there, unused. Or in other words, wasted.
skratlo 5y ago
Don't understand how this is the top comment, hello HN backdoors?
darylteo 5y ago
My immediate thought is that it could offer an alternative tier of support to subscriptions / patreon - i.e. people who supply a specific amount of storage / bandwidth can be considered a premium tier "fan" and get perks... exclusive gifts, services, cough content cough, moderation rights, etc. This could be an avenue for tech savvy sex workers who need an alternative to OnlyFans.
grishka 5y ago
PeerTube addresses this specific problem by employing WebTorrent so that when many people are watching a video at the same time they download from each other instead of everyone using up the server's available bandwidth.
tommek4077 5y ago
You are too used to paying for volume. Most classic server providers give you a fixed bandwidth without additional traffic costs.
progx 5y ago
Hobby? Not everybody does anything for making money. For exmaple Wikipedia, thausands of people write articles, for free, they got no money. Huge amount of open source developers publishing their work for everybody, free.
southerntofu 5y ago
> What is the incentive for anyone to [seed content]? The incentive is to make content you like accessible to more people. Of course you can do it in your "garage" if you have huge hard drives and good connectivity, but you can also do it as a collective by setting up your own instance and mirroring other instances aligned with your values/interests. There is exactly zero incentive for an instance to mirror public instances where people can upload terabytes of trash content. But there is strong incentives to replicate well-moderated instances with quality content, because the cost of that is very low (you can rent a VPS with 2TB HDD for ~20€/mo these days). > Exacerbated by the fact that the entire thing mostly seems to attract people who get banned from anything else I don't think that's the case. For now i've mostly seen established non-profits (eg. libre software/culture NGOs and workers cooperatives) who were disenchantized with Youtube. I've seen exactly one white supremacist instance, and it got delisted from "official" instances list in under 24h.
MiguelX413 5y ago
Except users don't have to give any storage space at all.

throwuxiytayq 5y ago

And yet, torrents are still a thing.

Barrin92 5y ago
because people want to download illegal movies and porn, or host linux isos as a service for the commons. There's practically no commercial activity around torrents because it's an incredibly inefficient way to serve large amounts of data.
- gtirloni 5y ago
  How's it inefficient?
  - Barrin92 5y ago
    because decentralized systems need to redundantly store data, a lot. Youtube accounts for, depending on the source 15% of global internet traffic. The reason you can watch videos at 1080p wherever you are in the world buffer free is because the system is ridiculously optimized, cached locally, and so on. Do you want to go back to 180p because one of the two guys hosting that five year old video with 50k views you liked just went offline?
    - gtirloni 5y ago
      Your second paragraph disproves your first, do you realize that? Youtube caches locally in a decentralized fashion, with redundant data, etc.
- zuminator 5y ago
  Legal or not, the fact that many people host and share dozens of large torrents from their home servers for free belies the claim that sharing video would necessarily be too expensive to be practical or would devolve back to turn off the century RealVideo quality.
  - Barrin92 5y ago
    the legality matters a great deal because if you steal the IP obviously even cumbersome technology becomes viable. Cartels don't use drug mules because they're such a fantastic feat of logistics but because hiring a freight train is somewhat problematic
- vadfa 5y ago
  Blizzard used to distribute updates using bittorrent before the advent of CDNs.
  - SilverRed 5y ago
    Everyone used to but almost no company does anymore. It's easier and more effective to just let each ISP cache the content of highly downloaded files.
    - kragen 5y ago
      You mean, pay Fastly or Cloudflare to run your swarm for you, instead of running it yourself on your users' computers?
      - SilverRed 5y ago
        Which isn't too expensive if you have paying customers. Doesn't make people angry when they are on data cap or trying to do something else on their network. Also doesn't have to deal with endless NAT and middlebox issues. But often ISPs will willingly host the content for free since it saves them money as well. Steam and netflix have caches inside ISP datacenters.
  - kragen 5y ago
    To be totally fair, Akamai predates BitTorrent.
- ekianjo 5y ago
  > illegal movies What's illegal movies?
  - kragen 5y ago
    Maybe Barrin92 is in the People's Republic of China, where movies criticizing the government are illegal.
  - 1MachineElf 5y ago
    Here's an example of a movie declared illegal in the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magnitsky_Act_%E2%80%93_Behind_the_Scenes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magnitsky_Act_%E2%80%93_Be...
    - mastax 5y ago
      The Wikipedia article doesn't mention any banning, and I can buy the film on Amazon.
- kragen 5y ago
  You may not be aware of this, but like everything on PeerTube, the video we are commenting on here is in fact served up via BitTorrent. I got about a third of it from the diode.zone seed, which, if I understand correctly, is paid for out of Micah Scott's Patreon. The inefficiency of torrents on near-symmetric internet connections is pretty minor. If a 1GiB movie is on Netflix, each user has to download 1GiB of data over your internet connection. If it's in a torrent, each user has to download 1GiB of data and also upload 1GiB of data. The efficiency difference is only a factor of 2. And the 1GiB of upload bandwidth was, in many cases, idle anyway. (Well, there's also the fact that the users are paying the cost of distributing the movie, rather than Netflix paying part of it. So you'd think that information that benefits the people who receive it, like Linux, porn, and sewing and soapmaking tutorials, rather than the people who produce it, like advertising, would tend to be distributed by torrents. But, for a commercial setup, this is a minor consideration; even ordinary hosted servers pay relatively little for bandwidth, and Netflix probably pays nothing in most cases. I suspect Micah Scott ended up paying about 10% of the cost of me watching this video, not counting the value of my time.)
  - leothecool 5y ago
    So... if I watch a copywritten video on peertube, the MPAA might sue me for being a peer and distributing it?
    - valdiorn 5y ago
      This is actually a really important question that we need an answer to.
- DocTomoe 5y ago
  IIRC, both Windows Updates as well as Steam use delivery systems that are very similar to torrents.

pacifist 5y ago

Why would you want advertisers? Advertisers are part of the problem.

cirenehc 5y ago
A significant portion of content creators do it as a full time job. Ads is a stable revenue stream for these content creators. You as a consumer are free to move to any decentralized video platform you like, but the main bottleneck for any significant shift in market share depends on content creators, and ultimately, on advertisers.
- jcims 5y ago
  How much would I have to pay to replace the revenue that a content creater would get from my eyeball traffic on YouTube? From what I'm reading it's less than a penny per video. I send about $30/mo to Patreon, that's enough for what, 3000 videos? I watch YouTube way too much, but I don't watch it that much. Realistically I should be aiming to replace Google's revenue for my eyeball traffic, because that covers all of the costs as well. Still seems very doable. It would be nice if Patreon partnered up with them and handled the transactions.
  - themacguffinman 5y ago
    Realistically, every PeerTube viewer would also need to pay for the thousands or more viewers any creator will lose by forcing viewers to pay money and by moving to a niche platform with worse UX and no serious discovery.
  - serverholic 5y ago
    That really puts it into perspective. If we each chipped in one penny per video we could replace advertisements for everyone. At least in terms of supporting the content creators.
    - chii 5y ago
      How many videos do you watch per day? If you're anything like me, i at least skim through 100 videos a day. Likely more, depending on my free time and interest. That's like 1-2 dollars worth of 'penny' donations per day. I'm not sure i would be willing to pay that, esp. if for videos that i'm only mildly interested in, and would not have gone to watch if it weren't free.

zelphirkalt 5y ago

That's the thing: It doesn't have to pay off and it doesn't have to generate revenue. That's not its goal. It is not a business model. If we want good content und independence from YouTube, perhaps it is time to see, that it might cost us a tiny bit of money each month, to uphold our freedom. One rented server can easily support many users, each of those can chip in to finance renting the server. It can be done transparently, so that users always know what they are paying for and how much is covered already for the month. It is time to learn, that we need to support what we like financially, so that people can actually live from providing us with it. As long as we do not do so, people can only provide us with their creations by generating revenue in other ways.

mattl 5y ago
How do we get good content from a platform that is explicitly copyleft? Will the vast majority of creators use this even as a backup?
- zelphirkalt 5y ago
  Why would copyleft have anything to do with the quality of content people upload? I am not quite following the connection there.
  - mattl 5y ago
    Most people don’t care about the license of a place to put their videos
    - detaro 5y ago
      Then why did you bring it up at all?
      - mattl 5y ago
        It’s literally all over the Peertube homepage

soheil 5y ago

Perhaps efficiency shouldn't be the thing we optimize for in this case. If you look at the internet it's extremely inefficient, there are millions of DNS servers all kind of have semi recent information about domains. There are millions of websites mainly hosted on extremely inefficient servers. There are millions of images and other assets mainly compressed less than they should be wasting tons of bandwidth. Yet here we are, the internet works and it works great. It'd be a sad day if someone argued that we should abandon all this and give the keys to someone like Google? Because it'd be more efficient? Screw that!

SilverRed 5y ago
The thing is that dns and static web servers are serving an absolutely minuscule amount of data while a single video on youtube is several GB in the higher qualities. No one can compete on video hosting because it is constantly at the upper limit of what is possible. It will be forever before all videos go 4k and when they do, there will be a push to have it all at 60fps and then at higher bitrates and then at 120fps.
- foxfluff 5y ago
  Diminishing returns. I think most people would agree that 1Mbps 1080p AV1 looks ok (https://demo.bitmovin.com/public/firefox/av1/ https://demo.bitmovin.com/public/firefox/av1/ -- use the quality selector and wait a while) and the vast majority of "content" doesn't warrant cinema quality anyway. There's always some push for more quality but that doesn't mean the audience requires it. Youtube itself had horrible quality and outdated codecs for a long long time yet and that didn't stop it from getting popular. Video snobs are a bit of a niche that youtube has historically not catered for.
  - SilverRed 5y ago
    As far as I know, youtube has always been pretty close to the top for free video streaming quality. Sites like facebook and such compress the video far more than youtube ever has. So yeah they were not the best video possible to create but they were the best for the internet at the time and still are. You can upload 8k HDR 60fps videos which are sized at multiple GB right now. Once youtube has it, people are not going to tolerate 720p video from an alternative.

belorn 5y ago

There are people who like running their own linux server with their own hardware. Occasionally those people are also interesting in creating videos or have friends/family that are. There are also people who get funded through sites like patreon, who might not care too much for youtube advertisement or YT freemium. Sometimes you even see youtube personalities switching to twitch or other platforms just in order to escape youtube and do legal activity which is just close to impossible on youtube. There is an endless stream of youtube videos complaing about youtube copyright system and how it makes their job close to impossible in some cases. Game reviews and movie reviews are two areas almost dominated by the issue of false copyright claims, which has forced some creators to abandon the platform as a revenue sources. There is even float plane which was designed from the ground to solve the youtube problem, created by a company that fully relied on youtube for its existence. If your company existence is depended on a free service provided by someone else, you might want to reconsider how safe you should feel. PeerTube might serve a similar purpose. On top of that we have scientists who might want to know that their research isn't taken down because of false copyright claims or fleeting politics. A company that has linked instruction videos in their books/teaching material might want to be sure that links still work 10 years from now. Activists might want to avoid the risk that their documentation doesn't go dark from a political requests or false claim. Police brutality victims might want to be sure that the copyrighted music playing in the background, placed there intentionally to get copyright claims, does not stop them from uploading videos.

jjk166 5y ago

The fact is most videos are unpopular, so they don't have a very high bandwidth requirement. Those that do have a high bandwidth requirement are the popular videos that will be seeded by more nodes in the network. Typically this popularity is brief, so as the popularity fades, nodes can switch to hosting other content without a dramatic uptick in bandwidth usage for other nodes. The system works as long as users typically seed approximately the same amount as they leech.

phkahler 5y ago

If distribution is done like bit torrent then the users pay for it - the cost is then distributed and very low. There needs to be some kind of peer to peer rating system so you can find content suited to you (reinforce your bubble I suppose) because there is going to be no central filtering authority, but that's part of the point.

caeril 5y ago

> What is the incentive for anyone to do this? What is the incentive for anyone to run a Tor/i2p/IPFS/Torrent seed node? This is difficult for normies to understand, but money isn't the only thing that incentivizes people to do things. There are many people for whom "Fuck YouTube" is the only incentive required to participate.

rnd0 5y ago
>What is the incentive for anyone to run a Tor/i2p/IPFS/Torrent seed node? Work. Usually for a three letter agency of some sort -at least for the first two.

howaboutnope 5y ago

> if users have to carry that load and seed your stuff they'll have to waste their own storage. Waste? They'd be using storage that would otherwise most likely be sitting there, unused. Or in other words, wasted.

skratlo 5y ago

Don't understand how this is the top comment, hello HN backdoors?

darylteo 5y ago

My immediate thought is that it could offer an alternative tier of support to subscriptions / patreon - i.e. people who supply a specific amount of storage / bandwidth can be considered a premium tier "fan" and get perks... exclusive gifts, services, cough content cough, moderation rights, etc. This could be an avenue for tech savvy sex workers who need an alternative to OnlyFans.

grishka 5y ago

PeerTube addresses this specific problem by employing WebTorrent so that when many people are watching a video at the same time they download from each other instead of everyone using up the server's available bandwidth.

tommek4077 5y ago

You are too used to paying for volume. Most classic server providers give you a fixed bandwidth without additional traffic costs.

progx 5y ago

Hobby? Not everybody does anything for making money. For exmaple Wikipedia, thausands of people write articles, for free, they got no money. Huge amount of open source developers publishing their work for everybody, free.

southerntofu 5y ago

> What is the incentive for anyone to [seed content]? The incentive is to make content you like accessible to more people. Of course you can do it in your "garage" if you have huge hard drives and good connectivity, but you can also do it as a collective by setting up your own instance and mirroring other instances aligned with your values/interests. There is exactly zero incentive for an instance to mirror public instances where people can upload terabytes of trash content. But there is strong incentives to replicate well-moderated instances with quality content, because the cost of that is very low (you can rent a VPS with 2TB HDD for ~20€/mo these days). > Exacerbated by the fact that the entire thing mostly seems to attract people who get banned from anything else I don't think that's the case. For now i've mostly seen established non-profits (eg. libre software/culture NGOs and workers cooperatives) who were disenchantized with Youtube. I've seen exactly one white supremacist instance, and it got delisted from "official" instances list in under 24h.

MiguelX413 5y ago

Except users don't have to give any storage space at all.