If I recall correctly the famous 1% rule (not that one) but rather[1] was the topic of a recent article (which I cannot now find but am hoping will randomly come into my memory at 2 AM and/or someone will correct me on) where the author gave some pretty convincing evidence that this kind of behaviour (the tendancy for _most_ people on the internet, 90%, to only consume content) also extends to open source ecosystems. I believe Matrix was given as one example.
Essentially no one wants to host and run the infrastructure for these things, only the "diehards" do. This is akin to how only the "diehards" produce content on Wikipedia, or YouTube. Remember, this is relative to the volume of people who only consume that content.
It's the same in P2P e.g. Bittorrent. The count of seeders (those who have the content and are uploading it to peers who need to download it) is almost always lower than leechers (those who are only downloading).
This is exacerbated with Peertube because video files are big, require a lot of bandwidth, and someone has to pay for that. If there is a set of diehards who love running Matrix or IRC (think other smaller networks not just Libera) or what have you then how many of that already small set can meaningfully afford to run a Peertube instance capable of serving a momentus volume of video traffic?
It's the same in P2P e.g. Bittorrent. The count of seeders (those who have the content and are uploading it to peers who need to download it) is almost always lower than leechers (those who are only downloading).
That's (at least partially) solved with incentives. Plenty of private torrent sites require you to keep a good ratio of download/upload to use them. As a kid I was definitely not a die-hard but still seeded to have access.
Yes, but that model only really works for piracy sites, and only ones with closed access[0], where you can maintain an internal ledger of who seeded what. On an actual streaming service where you have to pay for your TV shows or movies, the cost of video distribution will be dwarfed by the cost to license or produce that video. If you actually tried this on a premium video site you'd be charging $15/mo and then giving most people back a few pennies for their bandwidth.
Free-of-charge video might seem like a better fit, but that market was totally cornered by Google and YouTube; who basically have as much bandwidth as they could ever want. Yes, you can get around that with PeerTube, but there are so many other entirely unrelated advantages YouTube has over everyone else that this doesn't really confer much of a benefit.
[0] Interestingly, the FTP topsite scene would stick their nose up at even private BitTorrent trackers as not closed enough.
Yeah I remember those. One I used to use had a donation scheme where if you couldn't seed or didn't want to you could donate 10 Euros and 100 GiB of seed traffic would be applied to your account (just a number in a database not actual seeding) to keep that ratio up.
These people were _the_ tracker for the content in question so they were seeding a lot of content themselves hence the donations were a proxy.
Comments
If I recall correctly the famous 1% rule (not that one) but rather[1] was the topic of a recent article (which I cannot now find but am hoping will randomly come into my memory at 2 AM and/or someone will correct me on) where the author gave some pretty convincing evidence that this kind of behaviour (the tendancy for _most_ people on the internet, 90%, to only consume content) also extends to open source ecosystems. I believe Matrix was given as one example.
Essentially no one wants to host and run the infrastructure for these things, only the "diehards" do. This is akin to how only the "diehards" produce content on Wikipedia, or YouTube. Remember, this is relative to the volume of people who only consume that content.
It's the same in P2P e.g. Bittorrent. The count of seeders (those who have the content and are uploading it to peers who need to download it) is almost always lower than leechers (those who are only downloading).
This is exacerbated with Peertube because video files are big, require a lot of bandwidth, and someone has to pay for that. If there is a set of diehards who love running Matrix or IRC (think other smaller networks not just Libera) or what have you then how many of that already small set can meaningfully afford to run a Peertube instance capable of serving a momentus volume of video traffic?
I wish it wasn't so but it is.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)
That's (at least partially) solved with incentives. Plenty of private torrent sites require you to keep a good ratio of download/upload to use them. As a kid I was definitely not a die-hard but still seeded to have access.
Yes, but that model only really works for piracy sites, and only ones with closed access[0], where you can maintain an internal ledger of who seeded what. On an actual streaming service where you have to pay for your TV shows or movies, the cost of video distribution will be dwarfed by the cost to license or produce that video. If you actually tried this on a premium video site you'd be charging $15/mo and then giving most people back a few pennies for their bandwidth.
Free-of-charge video might seem like a better fit, but that market was totally cornered by Google and YouTube; who basically have as much bandwidth as they could ever want. Yes, you can get around that with PeerTube, but there are so many other entirely unrelated advantages YouTube has over everyone else that this doesn't really confer much of a benefit.
[0] Interestingly, the FTP topsite scene would stick their nose up at even private BitTorrent trackers as not closed enough.
Yeah I remember those. One I used to use had a donation scheme where if you couldn't seed or didn't want to you could donate 10 Euros and 100 GiB of seed traffic would be applied to your account (just a number in a database not actual seeding) to keep that ratio up.
These people were _the_ tracker for the content in question so they were seeding a lot of content themselves hence the donations were a proxy.