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Comment by ironjunkie | Hacker News Reader

I think the news from the last couple days, make it clear that the next step is to MOVE OUT of all those platforms.

History is repeating. As soon as they got enough power, they use it to exercise their own view of the world, deleting data//videos they don't like or reselling it to 3rd parties.

We need to come up with a better solution for non-technical users to post content outside those platforms.

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Fortuneately we have a distributed network of computers all over the world.

With the rise of home fiber and raspberry pi type cheap boxes we can do it with data local and software free.

I’m not sure what the business model is. I’m looking to porn and privacy for early examples. This worked for the Internet. AOL chat/porn was a huge use case for early chat/messaging. Music piracy and video piracy before Netflix/Apple Music. Etc etc.

It’s funny that you say that. 20 years ago nobody had a problem running their personal website or FTP server on an ISDN line into their garage.

Today I have 100Mb fiber to my house. I’m pretty sure that’s enough to handle a personal video website for somebody with a modest following. Yet we live on these massive centralized platforms.

Check out Plex

I'm not sure Plex would be a good option for sharing stuff with others. And on that note how many people actually have static IPs these days that allows them to easily host services like that? As the IP shortage worsens expect more carrier grade NATs to pop up.

Side node: if you doin't have ipv6 ask your ISP when it is coming.

You don't need a static IP with Plex, only a Plex account with granted access

Yes... I'd always been the type of person that ran some kind of server with network services in a DMZ on my home network. Of late I dismantled everything because it just isn’t worth the (perceived) hassle anymore. Most of all, cloud services and so forth have made us lazy.

We need to solve a couple of problems first. Right now, standing up a web host correctly is difficult. Getting the settings right is troublesome, buying a domain can be expensive and hard to set up, and directing the DNS of that domain to your home's internet (where most homes, at least in the US, are dynamic addresses) is very difficult. Video hosting is a tricky experience. Delivering quickly at multiple bitrates in an easy to use interface is hard. There is a reason why YouTube, Netflix, and more spend a lot of time working on improving video quality while reducing data usage. Finally, if everyone hosts their one videos, how will discovery work?

Good point. And all of this is exactly what needs to be resolved.

How? I would love to see some initiatives in that area (beside IPFS)

I would love to see it, too. The good news is that these are all solved problems. It's more about tailoring the information and distributing it. It could be the online equivalent of a Sears article on how to build a shed.

I personally really enjoyed the "Links" sections at the bottoms of everyone's Web 1.0 pages.

There are two hard parts: security and discoverability. As a programmer I know 95% of what is needed already exists, what is left is security and some ease of use.

plex (https://www.plex.tv/) already has most of what you need. However if I put a video of my kid's first words on plex how does grandma find it?

Why host videos rather than torrent them?

I should have expanded on this in my post, but I judge the level of difficulty on whether someone's grandmother would be able to upload a video from their iPhone/iPad/Android, for example a cute video of their grandson/granddaughter.

It might be easy for us to upload a torrent, but to most others, it is extremely hard, if not impossible.

The other problem with torrents is that it relies on reseeding. Preservation of content is a problem with torrents.

How is that a problem? Nothing is stopping people from seeding their content themselves or archiving it...

Yes, but it relies on people actively doing so. For example, look at the following torrent of the 2012 Olympics Opening Ceremony in 3D [1]. Yes, it is an illegal video copy, but a video that there are no legal ways to access anymore. This torrent has no seeders and because I don't have a copy, I therefore can't seed it.

[1]: https://thepiratebay.org/torrent/7487775/2012_Olympics_Openi...

How is this going to be a problem if the owner/publisher takes care of the seeding (i.e. they run a seeding node instead of or in addition to serving the content the traditional way)? IP laws have almost nothing to do with the way the content is delivered...

What is it about torrents that are specifically difficult for grandmothers? I've used several torrent clients and none of them asked me my age or gender, much less whether I had grandchildren.

The problem is that you need to show them how to transfer the video to their computer, how to create a torrent for it, and how to send out the magnet or torrent link/file. I would never be able to get any of my grandparents to follow and remember any of those steps, let alone teach them why they need to leave their computer on for me to access it. The entire process is painful. I can teach them to upload to Facebook or YouTube easily. Torrents, not so much.

That may be true of your grandmother, but what makes you say it's true of grandmothers in general?

Remember WinMX in the early 2000's? It was mostly used for sharing music. That had good discoverability for self hosted files.

Part of the problem is how asymmetric internet connections are now. My home connection may be 150 Mbit down, but I only get about 5 Mbit upload. And I gather this is fairly standard for most (American, at any rate) ISPs.

Discoverability is already pretty shitty on YouTube, imagine if everyone had its own server. How do you find anything relevant? We need to solve distributed search first, maybe something like the YaCy project.

Most consumer internet contracts contain clauses that prohibit hosting. Independent ISP's 20 years ago didn't have such clauses.

Yes they did. And we ignored it back then as well.

Largely, the TOS/“contract” doesn’t define host clearly. So you need to get real specific what you mean.

Blocking an ftp server because it’s a host would also block Apple iChat video because it’s “hosting” a video stream.

For my ISP (ATT/uverse) they prevent hosting a commercial service, otherwise they aren’t specific. And it’s not for hosting purposes, it’s for SLA purposes so they aren’t responsible for revenue loss from system outage.

I have the high end speed of internet from Comcast, but if you read their Acceptable Use Policy for XFINITY® Internet,

Technical Restrictions:

use or run dedicated, stand-alone equipment or servers from the Premises that provide network content or any other services to anyone outside of your Premises local area network (“Premises LAN”), also commonly referred to as public services or servers. Examples of prohibited equipment and servers include, but are not limited to, email, web hosting, file sharing, and proxy services and servers;

Who cares? ToSes should simply be ignored

Yes, blockchain powered video service running on own Beowulf cluster of Rassberry Pis, w00t!

Which would be wholly rendered illegal and anyone hosting any part of it held liable if there's e.g. child porn uploaded into it. Like what turned out to be true for bitcoin yesterday.

There is nothing illegal about running a bitcoin node in most countries.

I don’t think you understood the article on illegal material in the bitcoin blockchain.

I'm looking forward to IPFS https://www.ipfs.com/

Yesterday I googled "path loss equation" and I was astonished that the first hit was ipfs:

https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmXoypizjW3WknFiJnKLwHCnL72vedxjQkDDP1m...

itshappening.gif It started a rabbit hole

You got the TLD wrong. It's https://ipfs.io/

> "History is repeating"

How so? This is not about blocking political speech from these platforms. It's about a specific issue: whether YouTube should make it easy for people to find instructional videos on how to make and modify firearms.

Would you be upset if platforms blocked content showing how to make bombs? Biological weapons? Why not include the blocking of firearm modification videos?

Well it is the same thing.

I'm not a pro-gun at all. But this is a political move as an after effect of the school shootings, pushed by a left agenda for banning guns (which on a personal level I agree btw).

The issue is that you have a private company taking a political position and therefore forbidding specific videos based on that position.

This is something we saw in the past on other political subjects. They are abusing their power as platform as they know they are the de-facto platform used for video. It is about freedom of speech.

How would you feel if they suddenly decided to remove videos about evolution and darwinism? Or videos about abortion rights ? (this will never happen as youtube leans super left, but it gives you an idea how the other side sees it)

I'm not sure I see your point. You're saying that, because there is advocacy on behalf of changing company policies in a particular direction, for a legitimate reason, the companies should avoid changing their policies?

Under what circumstances would you want to see companies revise their policies?

EDIT: missed a word

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