Today I'm launching Flare, a video sharing site built on Nostr! 🎉

Like YouTube, Flare lets you upload, view, comment, and like videos from your favorite creators. BUT unlike YouTube, we can't strike, shadow-ban, or demonetize you just because we disagree 🤗

Since Flare is built on Nostr, you are free to serve your content from anywhere and consume content from any kind 34235 client you'd like.

Check it out at https://www.flare.pub/ 🔥

https://v.nostr.build/VygA.mp4

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Lfg!

Lfg

LFG!

nostr:npub1zach44xjpc4yyhx6pgse2cj2pf98838kja03dv2e8ly8lfr094vqvm5dy5 This looks awesome! So is all the content hosted on AWS? How do you plan to monetize this so it’s sustainable?

Um… we do all consider AWS a centralized, censorship-prone platform?

I love the idea of it, but decentralized storage is key sticking point

There are 2 elements of a YouTube style client.

The organization of metadata (listings)

Actual storage

YouTube does both because it’s centralized and I don’t know if it loss leaders it’s service for other purposes or not. Haven’t checked how profitable it is.

The idea here that you can use kind 1063 and host a URL elsewhere works too.

I’m still building something that could be useful for decentralized storage though it’s far from ready for prime time.

Flare’s is probably a good start especially for bootstrapping a set up.

🤷‍♂️

Please ser, consider torrent-streaming

what is odd about Torrents is nobody is required to actually keep the files available on their computers after downloading them and somehow Torrents still work

when i download a file i remove it from the torrents list and close the Torrent client for example.

my PC is on 24/7 and there is a solid terabyte of data on it that originally came from Torrents yet i am only making available a few GB of that data for maybe half an hour per month on average ... and Torrents STILL WORK

what if you were required to keep at least 100GB of active torrents available at least 8 hours a day on average ? the answer is downloads would max out your bandwidth 10 times out of 10, even with the average user having asymmetrical bandwidth like 300 down / 20 up.

It would make sense to keep the discovery/social aspect separate from the media storage and allow for multiple sources for the same video in case some go down. And possibly you could upload to many places at once.

(repeating myself here, it would be nice to have)

(A) Torrent (like) protocol where you pay for download/stream and get paid in bitcoin for actively hosting it. Where people could sponsor the streaming of a video (or a part of it) if they wanted more eyes on their content.

This.

When you want pay for hosting it also good idea to to encrypt it, so nobody can watch it in case he don't have original note with encryption key.

We need plasible deniability for seeders.

But i think apple have problem with torrents and sinilar thinks on ios.

Yes there are a lot of "details" to consider, making it as private as possible is one of them. Good point.

Apple... where we are going there are no appstores to stop us. (On long enough time horizon).

Had the same question.

Hell yeah.

Damn, Zach. Looks great. Keep it up.

This is BIG...

nostr:note12hqc96wdgktrykf0rvhkaqmvvza68saqh6m7x7ns78svje8fekyqxxj90j

?cid=2154d3d7vyoh9um6pjahe8y8z3f0atjtn0d4fnp34we02gk6&ep=v1_gifs_search&rid=giphy.gif&ct=g

Dude. Spectacular! Can’t wait to try it out 🔥🫂💜

Impressive sir!! 🔥

Roll camera! 🎥

Great work! I like your idea for incorporating advertising. Re-articulating ads as a "sponsor" and only in one place seems like a really big improvement over all the sneaking attention-gaming other platforms do, and probably better for the advertiser too. Still gotta watch out for the perverse incentives, once you're bought you're bought, but it's a cool approach.

Wow! Love it 💜

Dope

👌

Amazing!

Open source?

Amazing work Zach. 🤙🏻

Bullish.

nostr:note12hqc96wdgktrykf0rvhkaqmvvza68saqh6m7x7ns78svje8fekyqxxj90j

Dude, awesome 👏

Awesome

💣💣💣

Fuck ya dude, good shit!

100 MB max file size? Pretty small in the era of 4k. Plans to increase?

Yea, for sure. Just want to make sure everything goes smoothly at first, then I'll bump it up! (BTW, I think you should be able to upload more than that already 🤫)

Cool, thank you!

Wow, this is cool. Where is the video data stored?

Anywhere 😁

looks fantastic! I could not zap your launch video, error occured

This looks awesome!!!

the kind number lines up

And he’s the author of the NIP 😂 I should just assume so at this point

Please make sure there’s a way to control the video resolution, even in the browser.

I never use other YouTube p2p alternatives, because they assume that every video needs to be seen in HD or whatever resolution the creator used, and everyone has a perfect, unlimited data , fibre-bandwidth internet connection that the site operator has.

Most users have none of that, especially on mobile.

This looks so dope. Perhaps, have an onboarding guide for peeps who are new to Nostr?

Looks incredible. I salute you sir 🫡

FUCK YES

nostr:note12hqc96wdgktrykf0rvhkaqmvvza68saqh6m7x7ns78svje8fekyqxxj90j

I'm starting my show tomorrow so I'll definitely be posting to Flare as well! Good work bro.

Awesome! will definitely be checking it out.

Great work Zach, congrats! 😎

Very cool. Little UI issue:

“we can't strike, shadow-ban, or demonetize you”

But AWS can… perhaps allow NIP-95 relays to store videos too? Not a centralized service…

LETS GOOOOOOO!!! AWESOME!!! 👏

That's cool how are the videos hosted?

Been asking about a video event kind for a while. Glad to see one finally exists. 🍷

おめでとう㊗️🎉

Well done say it with me #Nostr goodbye YouTube hello Flare

Super cool! (and the 'account creation' process was SO simple!! :)

nostr:note12hqc96wdgktrykf0rvhkaqmvvza68saqh6m7x7ns78svje8fekyqxxj90j

This is awesome! 👏🏻 🤙🏼

Great work!

congrats on the launch, this looks really well done!

is the code open source? where is the media content stored when it’s uploaded?

😄

👀

Awesome.

Well done! Am I stupid or does the UI for login not work on iOS? Puts the text box out of view…..keen to login!

I had the same issue on Brave for Android.

Nice work! Interested to see how this plays out

Good luck

Nice! Ran into an issue when trying to login on Safari (iOS). Will try from a desktop. 🤙 https://video.nostr.build/f3fa03b380551adbded63745d6e33e8cfe5e466312210e269ca96d092b7d228b.mp4

🤩

Just one thing, Alerting Procedure Set for any illegal, dangerous contents might be necessary?!

Very cool, Zach.

Yes

Congratulations! Super excited about this! LFG! 🐶🐾🤣🫂🫂🫂🎉🎉🎉

There's a lot of buzz around your post.

Added to the https://nostraco.in/hot feed

Awesome work!

Hell yeah! Really pumped about this. Will be moving my YouTube page over to nostr. 🤙

Amazing work!!

Sick!!

I was like the 4th to share this... been waiting with a 5k zap....Can't believe no one's done this yet... GMFN...🤣

nostr:nevent1qqs9tsvza8x5t93jtyh3ktmwsdkxpwarcwstadlr0fc0rcxfvn5umzqpp4mhxue69uhkummn9ekx7mqzyqthz7k56g8z5sjumg9zr9tzfg9y5u7y76t47943tyluslayduk4sqcyqqqqqqgllmq4f

#m=image%2Fgif&dim=200x151&blurhash=%23O9R%3BSNQR%24x%3ADNb%5DofjYozIxV%7DV%3Fn%7Bx%5DXBovaeWXkvogocbdjXV%5BW9awj%3FXWs%3AV%3FRjabayoykAj%5Ep0V%5BockDjcozV%40ofWBWFbEe-ajkCV%40WAk8aebJoej%3FbJkCe.j%5DbHjb&x=a25e39640c885c9ed5984660292fe295d687d21bf46b426529bfd1195eb955c6

broo

Cool! Will try to upload some short nostr:npub105em547c5m5gdxslr4fp2f29jav54sxml6cpk6gda7xyvxuzmv6s84a642 travel videos. Also still waiting for a vine (short video sharing app) for Nostr. But this could be it 🤙

GANGSTA ⚡️👑💪🏽

amazing

BIG !!!!! (if true)

I mean the world really needs a decentrilized youtube without the drawbacks of youtube

It's fucking awesome but I want to pay for more storage and bigger file size limits!

I DEMAND 100 GB STORAGE AND 1 GB UPLOADS!

This is amazing.

Looks great. Had problems logging in, sending SATs to upload and if I refresh the page I get logged out. Could be great!

👀

Thank you for not naming it flarestr.

Wow I love this!

Thank you for making it!

👍

i paid the invoice twice but still cannot upload, still get the same pop-up to get started. please help thanks.

This is awesome! FYI Can’t get full screen or pip window to work on iOS in pwa nor safari directly nor brave

Can I create playlists yet?

LFG🔥

👀

🧡

Client ใหม่น่าลอง เป็น video sharing บน nostr คล้าย youtube ใช้ดู zap.stream ย้อนหลังได้ด้วย

nostr:nevent1qqs9tsvza8x5t93jtyh3ktmwsdkxpwarcwstadlr0fc0rcxfvn5umzqpzpmhxue69uhkummnw3ezuamfdejsygqhw9adf5sw9fp9eks2yx2kyjs2ffeufa5htuttzkflepl6gmedtqpsgqqqqqqs4hprp4

That's sick. How is bandwith and storage financed?

Oh my God this looks clean! Where's the powerboats guy?

nostr:npub1zwt6ufsk372gnfpsz5adkv4ykcc2vscewc9r9fv3jdnatvrtdp0szcr6wu have you seen this?

Very cool 🥳

💩 just got real

nostr:note12hqc96wdgktrykf0rvhkaqmvvza68saqh6m7x7ns78svje8fekyqxxj90j

nostr:note12hqc96wdgktrykf0rvhkaqmvvza68saqh6m7x7ns78svje8fekyqxxj90j

You're following a fake scammer imposter acct. Just so ya know.

🥂

npub13qwc3tsz3k67er860j2c949yvyjw3v6l447kjt66ex7mvukzsqhqqses6t

Ok, ok!

AMAZING! Love to see this and the site is absolutely gorgeous. Well done!

WOW. Thats so cool!!! Yes thats great!!!!!

👀👀👀👀

Nice! How I can help you?

Can one of you magic devs make a new year's resolution app? you full with bitcoin, and you have to work at your goals to get it back.

Perhaps there is something like this already?

Maybe a nostr thing where the community zaps you for reaching your goals?

Please add screencast so I can use it with my TV!

This looks amazing! I can't seem to zap? Does it require something like alby? I like to be able to zap from an external wallet.

Once again, nostr:npub1zach44xjpc4yyhx6pgse2cj2pf98838kja03dv2e8ly8lfr094vqvm5dy5 displaying his great taste and speed 🔥

Awesome app!!

nostr:nevent1qqs9tsvza8x5t93jtyh3ktmwsdkxpwarcwstadlr0fc0rcxfvn5umzqpp4mhxue69uhkummn9ekx7mqzyqthz7k56g8z5sjumg9zr9tzfg9y5u7y76t47943tyluslayduk4sqcyqqqqqqgllmq4f

Oooo this is interesting a decentralized youtube competitor

Great job man. I was just testing it and I get a blank screen at the nsec field on PWA.

Love it.

videos don't work for me even after connect through nos2x

When will you finish Flockstr 🗡️

Amazing work! Nostr.band relay is now indexing 34235, they're searchable with nip-50 and on the site https://nostr.band/?q=kind%3A34235+series

I don't quite understand why this is so good. Maybe it's technical and I just need to learn more, but isn't one major reason nostr is so censorship resistant because the notes can be posted to multiple relays? I've often been confused about how the analagous dynamic could be done for video. If this is just uploading a video to one server hosted by Flare, or anybody else, doesn't have the same long term problem as any other video hosting platform? #asknostr

nostr:note12hqc96wdgktrykf0rvhkaqmvvza68saqh6m7x7ns78svje8fekyqxxj90j

You can host the video wherever you want, which means self hosting is also an option. It increases censorship resistance because you can make choices about hosting your video in a place that will not remove it.

There is no real performant way to crowd host video afaik. The best we can do is make alternative hosts easier to set up and seamless for people to use.

I tested it primarily with Spring browser. Working great. Looking great. Very smart. I'm loving the app. 🫂💜

#m=image%2Fjpeg&dim=861x1920&blurhash=%5BEC%3DxW%7D%40I.oz%25hNxM%7BjZGGJUnPjF.6xs%24%24s%3A01IVt7axZgr%3FS%7ER*Mxnh%251s.4.Ipxusn%24%25t6R%2BNa&x=1b7e208b74895c704089c8c4eb57d0ed17dc12c50b5477f6bff58c63c66dee21

Who paid for the server, bandwitch, hdd ?

Nice!

I posted this on Hacker News. Hopefully your site isn't Hugged to death right now 😅

nostr:npub1chuth0ru5mq5pjeq6magew3kse4d5m7wgzqk3tnz0kgqwu3vt6ls5hq3gd can we get « Vespa » on this?

Im noticing lots of people are asking high quality questions about this on Hacker News. Might be worth while to engage with those 😅 ?

I feel that it will become a great alternative to privacy intrusive tech giants platforms! It looks great too! Thank you!!! Will there be a way to do split zap to content hosts?

Nice!

Looks great. I wanted to try it, so I paid 10,000 sats. It still won't let me upload anything. What am I doing wrong? Using Firefox+Alby here.

Has anyone managed to Zap on #Flare?

Just added flare as a PWA 🧡 I’m still learning. What’s an nsec? I’d like to sign up.

I can’t log in with my iPhone 13. Once the keyboard comes up, the text box moves off the screen.

Hello! Nice app. Congrats!

But I cannot install PWA from Spring app. 😌

What is PWA, and why does nothing happen when I try to purchase 2GB package?

nostr:npub15a2yrdugftfcgkw4hdmd99st3u4pszcxmdca7m76ssuxr22dtefsrsx6mp

Not your hosting, not your video

Absolutely fantastic. I'm so excited for video sharing like this.

Hey nostr:npub1zach44xjpc4yyhx6pgse2cj2pf98838kja03dv2e8ly8lfr094vqvm5dy5 — this is amazing. Will users be able to host videos on home servers at some point? Using AWS seems like a very dangerous solution for a platform like this.

They already can! You can paste any video URL when creating a post. I encourage everyone to host their own content if they're able to.

I entered a video with url and it won't play/upload (not sure which). Also, my payment for storage went through, but the client keeps telling me I need to pay again.

Very nice work!

How is this different/better than peertube?

How long should it take from paying for storage till you can upload something? I paid through the upload mechanism, but nothing happened and if I try to upload it asks me to pay again...?

Yo nostr:npub10fu0hlkx3s4n4dsgfu0cpqephga4afr4qtzpz9vsyqf7vj88v2yqdp8vp4, I've just paid for the premium service twice and it doesn't seem to register. When i try to upload a video, it just sends me back to another invoice. Any ideas on how to fix?

nostr:note12hqc96wdgktrykf0rvhkaqmvvza68saqh6m7x7ns78svje8fekyqxxj90j

Impressive.

Looks awfully similar to YT (which is good for adoption, I think 🤷‍♂️) and feels pretty mature already!

How are you going to handle copyright issues

looked to create an account...not clear how to do this. It is asking for "Nsec" which I thought was private and not to be shared.

Amazing! 🧡🫶🏾

*Trying to upload video but cannot get past ‘get started’ when purchasing Basic plan

🤦🏾‍♂️ Figured it out on desktop! 👌🏾🧡🤣

Amazing 🔥

LFG! This sounds like what we’ve been waiting for. 👏👏

How is storage incentivised to do it? They will not do it for free forever.

Wow awesome 🤩

Now we're talking!

Two comments. First, looks like the views are not registering on the videos. The latest one from Fractal Bitcoin has four likes, but no views. Something's broken there.

Second, instead of having to upload a video manually to your servers, could we drop an IPFS link to a video that we already uploaded to our IPFS server and have it connect to the network and start to play the video directly from the source? If your server needs to cache the data, that's fine, it's shared as a public file. But that would save a lot of hassle for those of us who use IPFS already.

Wow! Perfect! Freedom, what a great concept! ❤️

Great effort but could you please comment this opinion:

"Flare isn’t the Nostr solution you think it is"

https://simplifiedprivacy.com/flare/

Flare.pub is supposed to be a decentralized video app for Nostr

It is unclear how Flare prevents Flare itself from deleting your videos, as Nostr’s protocol doesn’t store videos, the relays store messages. Even worse than Nostr’s regular images being on 1 random server with government DNS, Flare centralizes that to a single entity. And even worse than that, Flare has chosen Amazon AWS with Google 3rd party JavaScript on his main website. It’s unclear what the purpose of Flare is, if it’s not to defy Big Tech companies.

There are a few approaches one could take instead. One approach is federation, where users self-host websites. This is how our website works with Nostr signing integration for video comments. This is also how Peertube works. Our website vid.simplifiedprivacy.com is basically Peertube but with Nostr subscriptions/comments.

Flare prevent's itself from deleting your videos because ideally, we aren't the ones hosting them. To be self-soveriegn you should be the one to host your own content and ensure it will persist. Flare and Nostr acts as a discovery layer on top, allowing people to find, comment, like, and zap videos that have been shared with the network. There are alot of great devs working on solutions to more robust self-hosting of media (cc nostr:nprofile1qyghwumn8ghj7mn0wd68ytnhd9hx2tcprfmhxue69uhkummnw3ezuargv4ekzmt9vdshgtnfduhszxnhwden5te0wpuhyctdd9jzuenfv96x5ctx9e3k7mf0qqszv6q4uryjzr06xfxxew34wwc5hmjfmfpqn229d72gfegsdn2q3fg5nmlgw ) but Flare as a project is strickly focused on the distribution and UI layer on top.

I've been hunting around searching for someone who is working on a bridge between IPFS and Nostr. I self-host all of the videos that I produce on IPFS before I upload them anywhere else, and the ability to plug in a CID into a video sharing service would be ideal. It's just a vision because I have no dev skills, but have you seen anyone working on making that connection?

Went to log in via npub, and it just spins and spins. Windows Chrome, no extension. got a github to report that on? Or are you using https://gitworkshop.dev?