it's not only mindless consumption imo. there's a lot of high quality long form video in YouTube, for instance. i wonder if it's possible to bring those creators to nostr.
Discussion
Serving longform is just expensive. A single 20 minute video viewed 100k times end to end can easily cost thousands of dollars in CDN fees. Maybe $2k if using the per-minute streamed deal thorough Cloudflare, easily $4k+ if via AWS and with higher-quality video.
So in a future Nostr where videos can get those numbers, earnings from zaps or ads would have to exceed that amount, otherwise the creator is actually taking a loss (or someone else is on their behalf).
Yup, that's (yet another reason) why I'm only betting on small niche communities.
For them the cost can be:
- more bearable
- lead to higher signal
And peer-to-peer solutions can be more viable and reliable in that scope too.
But serving the same 20 minute video over torrent is cheap (just get a seedbox and put the content there). Also people don't know how to compress things while retaining quality, a 20 minute video could be under 100MB and still be 4k, especially videos where the majority of the content is just a guy talking on camera.
Anime episodes compressed properly tend to be 100-200MB @ 1080 (sometimes < 100) and those have a much harder job than compressing a video with a giy talking in front of a camera about the news (or whatever)
There are no genralisable hacks in this world, sadly. Hence why everyone pays Cloudflare or Bunny or whomever.
No. They pay for those because the world has gotten lazy. Everyone is lazy and they want to take shortcuts.
They pay because nothing else works for users at scale. There are a number of technical reasons why you can't shoehorn Bittorrent into a CDN for a twitter clone. Latency first of all. The latency you'll get from Bittorrent, even in the best of times, will be a far far cry from what you'll get with even a lower-end CDN.
nostr:nprofile1qqsp4lsvwn3aw7zwh2f6tcl6249xa6cpj2x3yuu6azaysvncdqywxmgpr9mhxue69uhhqun9d45h2mfwwpexjmtpdshxuet59uq3zamnwvaz7tmwdaehgu3wwa5kuef0q9n8wumn8ghj7enfd36x2u3wdehhxarj9emkjmn99ah8qatzx9e8gmr3vdsnsu3kv96hjcthx4hr26pnds6ngv3jv3kngumj0y6kg7nxv4jngd3exen8zefcwvm8zem4v34hxdmydf6xvuelvfex7ctyvdshxapaw3e82egy8tpxn posted this video, it's 475MB.
5 minutes of handbrake, without spending any time optimizing settings, on a non-server grade GPU, turned it into 91 MB, with only slight loss of quality (which most won't perceive). With proper optimization it could be 50MB with no loss in quality but I'm not running my GPU for 3 hours, or renting a GPU online to prove a point.
My internet at home can download that 91MB straight in under 1 second. I can also seed that much in the same time.
But this is a best case scenario; let's look at worst case.
If I have as little as 1 peer with a garbage upload, sub 1Mbps and my download is also sub 1Mbps, the video is roughly 7 minutes, so 13MB per minute, 221kb per second, I would be able to watch it, as its being downloaded, at 2x speed without any lag.
This does not pass for internet video in 2025.
Only the creators that can bring a community with them.
Not the view-chasing ad-revenue folks.
I’m here to avoid video-based social media platforms. They are all platforms. There’s no decentralized way to manage all the bandwidth and storage needs. That’s why they have so much control over what people can post there.
No, we can build a decentralized video platform, over torrent
Someone should do this then.
That's what LBRY used to be, but they sucked from day 1. I'm sure someone is already working on it, seems like such an obvious thing
Wouldn’t it still be pretty slow and unreliable? I have to wonder why it hasn’t been done yet after Nostr has existed for several years.
It wouldn't be. Torrents can be faster than centralized platforms, whole serving better quality. I watch torrents while they're downloading all the time, never feel slowdowns, and usually they're done downloading before I'm even 1/3rd of the way through watching the content
Would torrents be seeded in relays? Content stored on blossom servers? I’m fuzzy on the technical details.
Franzap and Kieran have both demoed splitting up files over different blossom servers.
Don't really know what the next hurdle is.
DTAN-Relay running on a seedbox, yes
Don’t know what that means. Sounds cool, let’s see it actually working.
https://github.com/v0l/dtan-server
It's a nostr relay for torrents
If you go three years back you will find a note from my npub that says the exact thing.
But that was before blossom.
I think blossom + torrent has a chance.
the nostr client i've been assigned to build, i was going to have media previews but it has global feeds on free relays and some of the shit. ugh. rude people posting porn without NSFW tags on them. so, it's better to force the user to contextualize the media links so they can decide whether or not to open them.
video is the most potent medium for propaganda. it should be treated suspiciously by users.