Let me state this right up front, I am in no way associated with anyone that works for Mastondon, or any of the instances. And I'm in no way associated with any one working on the larger fediverse. The opinions are my own. And only influenced by my usage of a handful of instances and servers. Also I've not tried every type of service offered. (IE: Pixelfed, Lemmy). This will focus mostly on Mastodon, and Peertube. I also use Bookwyrm which is part of the fediverse, but I have nothing to compare it too, so I'll not talk about it here.
My social media needs changed over time.
Early in social media history there was Myspace, Facebook, and Twitter. And I had accounts on all three at one time or another. Myspace, I never used it. I can't remember a thing about it. It was a blip in the history books, a blink and you'll miss it kind of thing. Facebook - I only ever really had Facebook because that is were the kids shared pictures of the grand kids. Up until this year I had never posted on it, and it very rare that I ever go to Facebook for anything (Other then grand kid pics.). When we owned a business we did have a Facebook page and that helped to drive some people to our business. But that is a bit different then using the platform to meet and interact with other people. Facebook has it's place, but it's low priority for me. Twitter, I joined twitter early, perhaps 6 to 8 months after they first launched. This was my go to social network, and a true life saver in 2020. I spent a lot of time on twitter. And had a lot of interaction with people, bots, and whatever. The site really started to take a turn thou sometime mid 2020, and I started to see a lot of toxic posts. And I was already considering leaving the platform (Sometimes you just know when you are no long welcome.) I stuck with it mainly because of some of the people I did meet and get to know a bit. Most of the real people where generally nice people. Then it happened Elon Musk took over in 2022, and that was the time I left. It was during these times of change I was reminded of Mastodon. Bluesky and Threads were also working on starting up. I've not been back on Twitter since I left in 2022 shortly after Musk took over. I did try Bluesky, after finally getting an invite. I didn't really like it, but that was early - they were still working out things. It might have improved, it might not. It wasn't for me. I had already joined Mastodon Radio, having forgot that I had a Mastodon Social account that I had setup (and never used) in 2018. Threads owned by Facebook, and I just don't like Facebook enough to care about doing anything with them. SO Mastodon it is, I noticed that my posting habits changed about this time as well, while using Mastodon Radio I found that I watched more then I posted. I still had interactions with people, and they were good, even funny. I noticed the owner/moderator of Mastodon Radio really put a stop to toxic posts, even blocking entire instances if they became a problem. I even found some of my friends from Twitter had also moved to Mastodon. It was quite a different experience. But that was one instance, what about others?
That is what makes the Fediverse work, It is not just one social network. It is many independent networks, all talking together. Other services (Pixelfed, Lemmy, Bookwyrm, Peertube) can all interact with each other. This works to various degrees, and you can move across instances fairly seamlessly. In otherwords if an instance will shut down, there is away to move all your followers, and who you follow plus posts, and timeline to another instance. You can even do this to a limited degree between some of the services. This is something that centralized networks just can't do. And one of the main reasons why the Fediverse works so well.
Find an instance you like, stay with it? Find an instance and you want a change (for whatever reason) and you can move. Want to start your own private instance? No problem, move everything to that private instance! Want to block a toxic domain, easy.
Mastodon, also gives end users a easy way to setup filters, don't want to see posts about a "topic" filter it. This works, but kind of assumes that everyone will use hashtags, or post the same type of topic. You can start adding posts that don't follow the use hashtags guideline. But that takes a little extra work.
There are filters for just about everything thou, so if you on a user level don't want to see posts from an instance I think there is away to filter thou.
Mastodon really is a mature network, with lots of tools behind the scenes that just make things work. You as the user don't need to think about them. (You as a owner/moderator that is a bit different, and you do need to know some of them.)
So now I really don't post much, I play some games (wordle, and the like) and post the results. And I interact with others who also play the games. But my posting habits have really changed.
But if you would like to follow me I can't image it would hurt!! LOL. @kd8bxp@mastodon.social
Why Peertube fails (An opinion).
So a couple of years ago I left YouTube, mainly because of what I perceived as corporate greed at the time they changed how monetization worked, and honestly (in my opinion) made it very hard for a small channel to make anything. The thing is over the lifetime of my channel I only made roughly 600 dollars, money wasn't really why I was posting videos. It was completely the fact that they changed how it worked. Meaning even if I cared about making anything I probably couldn't.
I was already on Mastodon, and was aware of Peertube, so I thought, I really like how Mastodon works, I'll give peertube a try. But over the two year span, I believe I have been on three different peertube instances, two of them failed for the same reason, the third is trying a subscription based model (after been free/donate for quite sometime as I understand it). I am pretty new to the last instance, it's a large instance and I would have (and did) make the assumption that being a large instance they could handle the influx of videos.
I don't want to name names here, because I know these networks are small when you compare them to something like youtube. But that is part of the problem, they are small.
Video takes up a lot of storage space, and the more users you have, the more space you need, the more space you need the more it costs. And everything in the world of computers is becoming more and more expensive. I get that, I get that you can ask for donations, and not get them, and someone still needs to pay the bills. Which is exactly what happened with the two small instances I was original on. They simply ran out money, and the donations were not enough to cover the costs. It is said but a true reality of the situation.
The third and finally peertube instance I'm on is moving from a donation base to a subscription base with a free tier level of only 2gb. This is probably a good choice for them, they clearly were not able to pay the bills with just a donation model. And I wish them luck in the future. As for me, I have 2.1gb being used right now. It's not clear to me if a video will need to be deleted to recover that .1gb or if I'll be fine and just not able to upload anything until I remove something.
While the larger Fediverse is ad free, being ad free for a Peertube instant just doesn't work. Peertube needs ads. And remember it was ads that caused me to leave YouTube, so this statement coming from me may seem counter active. But hear me out. They don't need to be aggressive like YouTube, maybe an ad every 3 videos, but they do need them. They need something to help off set the costs of running a system that depends on a lot of data being stored. The larger the instance the more they need ads. It's just a cold fact.
They also need the donations, they can't just depend on ads to pay the bills, they need people who are willing to say, yes - you have some ads - but you are still better then YouTube or another centralized video host.
Going to a subscription model, may work. It doesn't really work for me. I'm a small fish in a sea of large fish, I don't post video enough to pay for monthly storage. I'm not even mad they did it, in fact I understand the costs. But I am left with very few choices, it seems a couple of years ago I had some similar choices. And two of the largest of those choices are still alive and well. Both depend heavy on an AD stream. I could move to yet another Peertube instance, but I fear in the end any Peertube instance that lets users join will run out of money sooner rather then later. Leaving me to choice to go back to Youtube (with a slightly different perspective, and definitely a better understanding of storage.) My other choice was and is Rumble. Rumble is kind of interesting, where you can get monetized from day one, but (my videos) may not been seen because the algorithm seems to favor politically and commentary videos over maker style videos. My other choice is to spin up my own (on my own hardware I already own) Peertube instance. This will cost some money up front, but is something that I can completely control. And make so only I or my family post videos.
The issue with Peertube and the larger Fediverse - peertube (at least from what I've seen) seems to work a bit differently - An instance doesn't get automatically discovered, your instance has to follow other instances for the videos to show up (at least that is my understanding) They also don't show up in the Mastodon time line unless you or someone follows the channel content, not the owner of the channel. (?) But once they are in your timeline you can boost them, and people can favorite and reply and that shows up in the peertube instance. At least that is how I understand it too work. So creating your own small instance might not be the best way to have your videos found (?) Also your ISP may not be happy that you are hosting a "server" on your network. In fact they might get down right grumpy about you hosting a server.
In conclusion.
While the wider Fediverse gets a lot of things right, Peertube just is not one of them.
This has been an opinion from LeRoy Miller, KD8BXP or follow me @kd8bxp@mastodon.social
No comments:
Post a Comment