this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2024
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Maybe the problem in that equation is the expectation of virality and not self hosting?
It doesn't matter if virality is the goal, unless you're suggesting it be actively prevented, virality is just a natural phenomenon of the internet. The term viral generally implies uncontrolled exponential spread. To this day, stuff goes viral without people intending it to.
And if you architect the system to scale a p2p network proportional to virality (ex. as people share it, they also self-host) you run into a ton of security and abuse challenges. We're also stretching the definition of "self-hosting" at this point.
I actually kind of love the idea of a per diem Unknown User Limit. Like the first 5000 unregistered users can view the site, but after that they get dropped at ingress. Also, limit user signups per day (this ain't about growing user base, it's about preventing virality)!
Sure, you could still need an ingress server that can handle a high load to avoid the accidental ddos if word-of-mouth gets out about it, but that's a million times lower of a requirement than a server that can handle serving a web page or app to the same number of users.
Yeah, I actually kinda like the idea of a whole internet where avoiding virality is somehow built into the system. But I think such a system would naturally evolve into a p2p solution. You couldn't stop people from taking and rehosting content on their own servers.
The post I was replying to claimed virality and self hosting are at odds with one another because it causes skyrocketing expense. My point was that maybe someone selfhosting a server in the fediverse is not as interested in virality. And I doubt even the most viral posts in the fediverse would break the bank of a selfhoster
And my point was directly in response to your point.
We are talking about a TikTok alternative. If getting as many people as possible to see your stuff isn't your goal, then why would you post it in the first place?
Making your content go viral is pretty much literally the only point.
Virality is nowhere near the only reason for posting videos. People post them to make jokes, teach something, reply to someone else, etc, or all the same reasons someone might make a blogpost or a post on a link aggregator.
There is no such thing as a form of media that is only applicable to a specific scale of use. Long form and short form media is useful to large and small groups.
For example, my partner coaches high school policy debate, which has long form video training content, short form content (30 seconds - 5 minutes) like clips from tournament rounds or practices, for recruitment, and very short form (1 - 30 second) clips that are mostly memes.
Their shorter form content is explicitly meant not to be viral, it's purely for their school, and other kids in their debate league. Most of it's not even parsable by non-debaters. It's only useful to their small community, but that's what they want.
And your partner uploads those videos to TikTok? Because I'm not saying every video on the internet has to be a nine hour video essay that's going be be watched by five devoted people, I'm saying that an alternative to TikTok, which is what we are discussing about here, can never work if you have to self-host those videos because the entire point of the platform is about making viral content.
Obviously self hosting for personal/limited use works, that's how the internet worked for two decades before all of these platforms even existed. Before Youtube and Imgur and Twitter and Tumblr, I had a magazine subscription that came with a free email address and a hosting service with a whopping 50MB of storage, and that was plenty enough.
The short form ones go on insta and tiktok.
It's important to distinguish between why a company offers a service, and what people use the service for. TikTok gets used for lots of content that doesn't go viral, and that doesn't try to chase the algorithm.