I know this is a silly question, especially as I’m currently focused on local-only feeds, but there’s just one part of the Fediverse I wish would get more love: PeerTube. While there aren’t a lot of people actively looking for alternative video hosts outside the big guys (Twitch, YouTube, Dailymotion, etc.), it would be nice to see wider adoption of PeerTube. I think better integration with other softwares would be helpful in that regard, if for no other reason than just that it brings attention to the services available.
Peertube is inherently very scalable with relatively little cost due to an artifact of all social media platforms: Most of the traffic is driven by a tiny amount of videos/magazines/etc…
For services like youtube, you can use this as a way to quickly cache data close to the place it’s going to be streamed: e.g. Netflix works with ISPs to install small servers at their locations to lessen the burden on their (and the ISPs) systems.
But with centralised systems you can only push this so far since ultimately everything is still concentrated at one central location.
Hypothetically, if you could stop this super-linear scaling for each user (you need to pay per user plus overhead generated from managing them at scale), you could easily compete against the likes of youtube simply because, at sufficient scale, all the other effects get ammortized away.
Peertube does exactly this by serving the videos as webtorrents: essentially this means that for every “chunk” of a video you downloaded, you also host that chunk for other people to download. That means that peertube itself theoretically only has to host every unique video once (or less than once since the chunks are in the network for a while), meaning you rid yourself of the curse of linear user scaling against users and only scale sub-linearly with the number of unique videos (how sub-linear depends on the lifetime for your individual torrents; i.e. how long a single video chunk stays available for others).
The costs that remain for every peertube instance is essentially the file hosting costs (and encoding the video, but that also only scales in the number of videos and could be pushed onto the uploader using WASM video encoders).
Storage itself isn’t cheap, but also not ungodly expensive (especially since you can ammortize the costs over a long time as you platform grows with storage prices in a continual massive decline).
Platforms like Netflix and youtube cannot do this because
- Netflix is a paid-service and people don’t want to do the hosting job for netflix after having already paid for the service
- Youtube has to serve adds which is incompatible with the “users host the content” method
In general torrenting is a highly reliable and well tested method that scales fantastically well to large data needs (it quite literally becomes more efficient the more people use it)