Decentralized media hosting is probably something a separate protocol should solve really well first. Nostr can be the algorithmic or lack of algorithmic social layer.

Tik tok works not just because of the consumption algorithm, but their highly suggestive capture medium and editing suite. You can byo camera and editing suite, but there is an highly suggestive standard of deliverable. Just offering vertical scrolling video isn’t enough to culturally coerce cohesiveness of the deliverable, and that comes long before sorting them algorithmic.ly

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I still haven't heard a compelling reason why the relay-based network topology isn't a good fit for media hosting. Yes, we shouldn't force every relay to accept images, but it still seems like a very good way to handle that problem.

I don’t have a better idea. And there really isn’t a different between xyz monitoring his/her nostr branded image hosting server and monitoring that stored as a relay from an illegal content perspective.

I noticed you defaulted to speaking about images, tik tok is 15-60 seconds but does now allow up to 10 minutes. Is the relay software the same for an image relay, as it is for a 60 second video relay, as it is for 1080p 10 minutes, as it is for 3 hour long 4k videocasts? Maybe the latter, or latter two is torrents stored on relays? Could it/should it all be encrypted and thus dissolve some liability on the relay runner? Maybe they are separate nips and not separate protocols… but does everything that wants to load these decentralized images/video need to be a nostr client? Does that hinge the success or failure of one to the other in an unfortunate way?

I don't really know, it probably depends on the scale. You'd probably want a CDN in any case. I don't know enough about torrents but I would imagine they'd be too slow to support streaming on demand.

As far as separating protocol/nip/whatever, I'm pretty neutral on that, except that media hosting is needed by nostr and if we made it "a separate protocol" that nostr clients had to support anyway it would just reduce adoption and not really solve anything. In the opposite direction, I'm not sure it being nostr or not nostr would matter to non-nostr use cases, it's just an interface people can use or not.

even if it was just one image relay that was operating in a nostr native way, that would allow other relays to spin up… I’d be much more likely to pay for premium services from that.

cohesiveness is something all popular platforms share, yet it is also what dumbs them down. GAB doesn't really have it - you can write super long posts and embed tons of links and images in them, then edit over and over. i like it because it doesn't treat people like retarded children.