Would someone be able to explain to me how all of these platforms would stay alive if the masses joined?
For example, PeerTube is a loved one by people who want privacy and freedom. What if there was a sudden influx of creators and viewers? There definitely isn’t enough storage for the creators, and would the viewers not encounter issues like buffering?
I’m all for it all of it, I just am kinda confused.
I’ll also ride this post a little and add that I think that a big reason all of this is taking so long to become mainstream is because it’s too complex compared to the more commonly used platforms. Things need to be put in front of peoples faces or they won’t use it. The information is just too spread out. We can blame the current mainstream platforms for that, but we’re past that now and need to find a way to make this easier.
Anyone have any thoughts on that?
Agree with @[email protected]
Note that the one that has taken off; Mastodon - has a user face that is as easy as Twitter. Also note that something like 500k out of 4 million users are using Mastodon.Social, the main developer’s instance.
I think people will naturally migrate to the most easy to use/popular option in a decentralized fediverse.
OP is right that if the decentralized tool isn’t easy to use it won’t gain widespread adoption. For example, WordPress is open source software that many now host themselves, but majority of WordPress users don’t host their own instance, they use independent firms or they relay on WordPress.com(mercial) to set up the instance. I see that being the same with the fediverse. Actually there is a few companies in Europe already providing fediverse hosting; like https://masto.host/
Sustainability-wise; I still believe the $1 per user per year price for social media is sustainable and could be used for all of these fediverse social apps (though peertube may be more expensive with bandwidth.) Imagine Mastodon.Social, with its 500,000 users, all paid $1 a year. Eugen would have a decent amount of cash to maintain the servers and hire developers. The barrier is the global poor not having that kind of money (could be subsidized by the rich), and payment processing barriers because of US control of the financial system. As crypto becomes more widely adopted that problem may diminish.
There’s also the co-operative model; Social.coop is a mastodon instance for example where the members of the social.coop site vote for the board of directors (one member one vote). Lemmy.ML for example could operate as a co-op where each member pays an annual membership fee to vote for the board and optionally major referendum/bylaw decisions (like what development should focus on, setting prices, etc.)
As more people joined the Fediverse, more sites would grow to accommodate the new users. You can have both big and small servers that focus on certain things.
It has not been a problem for email and it is technically decentralized. You would probably just get one company that had a larger percent of the user share. Imagine Google having a Fediverse server lol.
Peertube is kind of a special case because videos require lots of data storage. But everyone uploading to YouTube already has their videos stored on their own hard drives, and they could easily create torrents out of them. But you’re right there, centralizing a ton of media content on even federated servers is a big problem. Torrents have that solved tho since any video with even a few seeders can be streamed.
Text content tho, is not a problem for federated servers. I think the entirety of wikipedias English text data is 100GB.
