• CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
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    1 year ago

    There’s nothing that stops you from making a shitty ad-laden but free and easy to sign up for Lemmy instance. I’m guessing that’s the inevitable economics once the fediverse reaches a certain size.

    Come to think of it, with the TikTok comparison, is anybody hosting videos on fed yet? That would be the hardest one to do for free.

    • TexMexBazooka@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      It wouldn’t be possible for an individual. Video hosting in the scale we see from something like YouTube is built on massive content distribution networks.

      • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
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        1 year ago

        Yeah, I don’t know how YouTube works exactly, but the margins they’ve historically earned tell me it’s not simple or low-resource in any way. How big a scale do you need before you could make it work? It’s not something to run on a home server, but I assume you don’t have to be YouTube, if you could earn a bit more per user.

        • TexMexBazooka@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          Massive up front investment. Millions of dollars of hardware, distributed to be close to end users to minimize latency, all with their own redundant internet connections.

          Petabyte level storage- that’s thousands of terabytes. Video storage takes up a lot of space, and storage drives fail. For every piece of equipment you have to buy a second one to run in parallel, that way if one fails the other can keep the system running. Oh, and you need a third so you can replace the one that failed.

          Hosting in general is a very high investment prospect. You can do it Inexpensively using something like plex, but that isn’t very scalable.