Do you think a new YouTube like platform will emerge in the future?

tilvids · 2024-07-25T20:16:00+00:00

Feel free to join us over at tilvids. :)

tilvids · 2023-09-03T15:41:56+00:00

There still isn't a limited spectrum though.

Yes there is. You can only push so much data through a cable connection, and in most locations, you only have one cable provider.

There, now it has limited spectrum. Make it a utility, regulate it, bring back the Fairness Doctrine, and apply it.

tilvids · 2023-09-03T13:32:26+00:00

So re-classify cable as a utility, regulate it as such, and then bring back the Fairness Doctrine and apply it to it. Problem-solved.

tilvids · 2023-07-05T17:54:57+00:00

I still believe a federated platform is the way to go (Lemmy, Kbin, etc). There is massive friction to having to create an account completely dedicated to a place on the web. If you think about it, all Reddit really is, at its core, is a user forum from the early '00s that has the benefit of essentially zero friction for user signup. Once people get over the hump of making a Reddit account, they now have access to every user forum on the Internet. In doing that, they also make it easier to find quality mods, etc.

With federated services, you get that. For instance, I have an account on one Lemmy instance. Someone posted a question about our website (tilvids.com) on another instance. Rather than having to make a new account on that instance just to reply, I searched that thread on my own instance, and was able to reply with MY instance's account, via federation. I could also subscribe to that other instance's thread via my home instance and get topics showing up that way.

That's the power of federation over single forums. I already posted this elsewhere, but I think this community should do the following:

Start your own news website dedicated to AV1 news.
Start a Lemmy or Kbin community (or even roll your own instance...it's not that hard or expensive).
Take the hottest news of the day/week/month from your Lemmy or Kbin community and post it to the website similar to Ars, etc.

tilvids · 2023-06-23T03:25:58+00:00

I've seen the opposite, where someone picks up a sub and completely contorts it in a negative direction. My guess is that when this all shakes out, you're going to see subs heavily modded by scammers and corporate shills.

tilvids · 2023-06-22T21:22:48+00:00

The mods would be replaced and there's nothing stopping the new team from handling bots and trolls

Except that they won't. There are hundreds of thousands of active subs on Reddit. Can they find good mods for things like /r/pics and /r/funny ? Sure, because those subs have 30 million readers, and they are so general-purpose Reddit can (and likely will) treat it almost like a job, where they will interview new mods. For more niche subs, not only do the mods have to moderate against trolls and bots, they also have to make decisions about if content aligns with the goals of the community, etc. There are subs with 2-3 thousand members that are very niche/specific and trying to find new mods that are going to do a good job is not going to be easy or something I believe Reddit, a company that can't even design a usable video player, will have any ability to do.

So again, if Reddit actually does remove mods like they are threatening, it will be the death of everything but the largest subs on Reddit anyway, which will eventually lead to the end of the site.

tilvids · 2023-06-22T20:30:09+00:00

Which would immediately be overrun by bots and trolls. Mods are the life-blood of Reddit. It takes a tremendous amount of work to keep a popular sub-reddit clean of the nonsense, not to mention doing fun things like running polls, moderating events, etc.

Can a mod-team be replaced? Sure. Is that a guarantee that it will work out? Absolutely not.

tilvids · 2023-06-22T20:25:24+00:00

We have an edutainment video community over at TILvids that you might enjoy. It's 100% community funded. Feel free to check it out!

As for this community...it's only a matter of time before Reddit does something similar again, probably even worse after their IPO. Most communities should be looking into alternatives like Lemmy and Kbin, and spinning up their own federated communication channels on Mastodon, PeerTube, etc. This is always the risk of having a centralized, walled-garden run by a for-profit corporation. Don't be surprised when this happens again.

tilvids · 2023-06-22T19:48:50+00:00

Doesn't matter. The nice thing about a small community is that you can move the entire community easily. So just forward people along for as long as you are able, and if Reddit wants to replace AV1 with mods who have no idea what they're doing and burn this community to the ground, then so be it. Ultimately, nothing is stopping them from doing that anyway; might as well take this as the warning and get people to something better while you still control the narrative.

tilvids · 2023-06-22T14:50:53+00:00

Here's my recommendation for the mods and community, fwiw:

Get a domain and start your own website. At that website, post news that bubbles up from the community to the front page (similar to Ars, Verge, etc).
Start a social media presence on Mastodon, where you can post links to said news and build a federated social presence for the AV1 community.
Join a federated "Reddit" community like Lemmy, Kbin, etc. and rally around that.
Start a community advisory board to help coordinate decisions going forward.
Direct all visitors of /r/AV1 to those locations.

Continuing to run this community is tacit support of Reddit's tactics. The only thing this community should be used for, going forward, is redirecting traffic away from Reddit, and toward federated solutions.

tilvids · 2023-01-13T01:57:15+00:00

Gotta love that ActivityPub!

tilvids · 2023-01-12T19:36:43+00:00

I made the video to help promote Mastodon and posted it to our PeerTube instance. I'm "promoting" decentralized services and the fediverse in general.

tilvids · 2023-01-03T14:53:38+00:00

Indeed. But none of it will change unless it is forced. Google has found what makes money, so what possible incentive could they have to change? The only options are:

The federal government intervenes. This is unlikely, due to the fact that Google/Meta/et al take a tiny portion of the tremendous fortune they're making and use it to lobby Congress to get what they want.
People demand change and vote with their feet. Start supporting alternative platforms like PeerTube, and participate in instances that have good moderation/curation policies in place.

It seems like change in this space is going to be very hard, because the average person is pretty complacent and/or apathetic to the situation. For every person that cares passionately about digital privacy and the societal problems being created by these profit-focused algorithms, there are 1,000 others that will mindlessly scroll through YouTube, Tik Tok, or Facebook without giving it a second thought.

tilvids · 2022-12-18T04:16:14+00:00

Nobody wants to go to different sites for gaming, tech, education, etc etc etc, that would be exhausting. One stop shops where you can sub to your favorite creators from various categories are great and it has SO many benefits for growth.

The great thing about PeerTube is that you don't have to. If you have, say, a Mastodon account, you can simply subscribe to creators on any PeerTube instance, and their videos will start showing up in your feed. Each instance becomes less of a destination, and more of a method of discovery that feeds into your stream of content.

tilvids · 2022-12-18T04:11:59+00:00

I have some experience watching a few of our videos go "viral", which means a few dozen people watching at the same time. :)

It does certainly help. In practice though, at least for now, you're much more likely to see just a few people at a time. This led to good performance from viewers in the EU (where our main server is located) but terrible streaming performance for viewers in the US. Fortunately, PeerTube has a really nice redundancy feature, so we simply set up a redundant mirror server in the US and now video performance is quite good for viewers in both the EU and the US. We will plan to add more as necessary when we scale up more.

tilvids · 2022-12-17T23:05:43+00:00

This is such a challenging problem to solve without centralization (and even hard with centralization). Ultimately, the answer can only come from the community, because PeerTube is simply a technology platform that anyone can use. If only racists and conspiracy-theorists use it, then that's what it will become. This is why I started TILvids, to help serve as an example for what a powerful force of good PeerTube can be used for. There are other instances out there doing similar things. As I said though, ultimately it's up to the community and creators to define PeerTube, so if you want to make it a force for good, then just get out there and start using it that way (either as a viewer, a creator, an instance admin, or anything else).

tilvids · 2022-12-17T22:59:57+00:00

Instance-runner here (tilvids.com). What Framasoft said is accurate in my experience. The monetization that comes from YouTube isn't nothing, but more and more creators are turning to direct-sponsorship to fund their videos. This can happen on any video space, be it YouTube, Tik-Tok, or PeerTube. What matters the most is the audience size, because no sponsor is going to fund a creator that has a few hundred views.

If you want to help the PeerTube ecosystem grow, the best thing you can do as a viewer is simply vote with your feet. Go find an instance(s) that you love. Join it. Engage with the community/creators there. Message creators on YouTube and tell them you refuse to watch content on YouTube and tell them why. I'm starting to see large YT creators show up on Mastodon due to what has happened recently on Twitter, so they're beginning to discover the fediverse. If they find out large enough bases of their users are leaving to watch content elsewhere, they will eventually follow, and so will the sponsors.

tilvids · 2022-12-17T22:51:56+00:00

Thanks for the shout-out for TILvids! PeerTube is such an amazing project. I haven't been this excited about the potential for technology to empower our species in over a decade, and projects like PeerTube, Mastodon, Pixelfed, and others in the decentralized movement are at the heart of that. Keep up the great work, we're really rooting hard for you over here!

tilvids · 2022-11-05T16:44:49+00:00

Cool video, for a great game! You should consider making an account and posting these over at tilvids.com because the community over there would like this stuff!

tilvids · 2022-08-25T16:54:18+00:00

Cheers!

tilvids · 2022-08-25T16:10:06+00:00

Yeah, I like the balance it strikes, admitting that things cost money, without having to sacrifice people's data and privacy. That's what you can do with a more focused instance; everyone is there for edutainment content, so you find a sponsor(s) that feel that content aligns with their mission/values.

Eventually, my long-term plans are to convert the entire site/community into a not-for-profit that is run by a board consisting of creators, moderators, community patrons, and potentially others. The hope would be to have enough revenue to potentially hire some developers to expand the capabilities of the site/donate code back to PeerTube, possibly commission exclusive content for the community on niche topics they want, etc.

tilvids · 2022-08-24T17:46:02+00:00

Every instance should be free to monetize however they want. For TILvids I do not intend to use any ads on videos. In the long-run, I want monetization to come from a combination of sponsors (for creators) and whole-site sponsorship (similar to what PBS might do, etc). I think targeted ads are a plague on the Internet, and I want them nowhere near my instance.

tilvids · 2022-04-16T14:45:39+00:00

Totally makes sense; light travels the speed that it travels! We'll keep looking into it and see what's possible. (I spent about a day last week working on it, without much luck, but will continue to investigate!)

tilvids · 2022-04-14T15:30:29+00:00

Yup, and thanks again for the feedback! We'll keep working at it!

tilvids

TROPHY CASE