limblogs:

 A couple of things to note:

1. Firefox rolled out decentralisation protocol support in update 59 (January 2018)

Support for Decentralization Protocols: Mozilla has always been a proponent of decentralization,
recognizing that it is a key ingredient of a healthy Internet. Starting
with Firefox 59, several protocols that support decentralized
architectures are approved for use by extensions.  The newly approved
protocols are:
Dat Project (dat://)
IPFS (dweb://  ipfs://  ipns://)
Secure Scuttlebutt (ssb://)
Firefox itself does not implement these protocols, but having them on
the approved list means the browser recognizes them as valid protocols
and extensions are free to provide implementations.

2. So just to explain about data as I’m seeing that some people are not aware of these differences. I don’t track usage on my limvids.net site but the back end is AWS and sometimes the bill comes up big enough to notice (ie more than $2). When my Peaky Blinders vid was in Youtube Jail and the only place to see it was my site? If I recall correctly, limvids did about 7.2tb of traffic that month. That’s just a single vid. It’s not even that many downloads! It’s maybe ten thousand people. If I just run a quick wget on trickster… you would have to read every single story ever written by @cesperanza like two million times to approximate that. Even the mighty Speranza isn’t doing 2 million hits per story per month. (But a popular vid on Youtube can go >2 million hits easily and often much more. That happens not infrequently. ) A single vid could take out any backstop fandom could pay for and it doesn’t even need to go viral. The cost of hosting is just massively massively more. (All estimates are off the cuff but the scale is right.) Art is in an intermediate position between vids and fic on this scale.

That’s why before we even started coding on AO3 back in urgh…2007 we were discussing swarming and distributed systems for vids with other vidders/vidfans – it’s a conversation that has been going on this whole time, but so far has had insurmountable technical challenges. AO3 can’t host vids directly until/unless something game changing happens with data storage. Vidders do need hosting. Vidders are uniquely vulnerable to TOS – vidding is in eternal Strikethrough. But we could genuinely sink the whole ship. Vids are so massive they can sink any single host. But something game changing IS happening with networks right now.

The only viable long term approach in my opinion, is to slowly build a very densely connected decentralised network that includes all the watchers and lurkers and readers and reccers and other members of our community that aren’t producing 400mb files but are online a whole lot, that spreads the load across hundreds of thousands of people; yes with seeder nodes that fill in any uptime holes and yes with hosting for people that can’t host their own stuff for a variety of reasons, but no to trying to build a traditional hosting system for vids. (I mean, obviously go ahead – I won’t stop you! I’ll upload to you! I’m just saying why I’ve never personally gone for it.) It’s too expensive and too fragile.

This is a discussion about which reasonable and informed people may disagree, btw. I’m not saying I’m 100% right about all this. I’m just sharing my conclusions and trying to give those who don’t have it, some context and places to go draw their own.

People will still use Youtube mostly for a long time and that’s great – let Youtube foot the bill as much as pos (I embed from Youtube at the top of limvids to cue the casual viewer to use their bandwidth not mine and it works well) , but every vid that gets kicked off Youtube and every artist that gets kicked off here should, eventually, be able to find a home with fandom.

3. My Rotonde is here: dat://66af3f8743cc293ebb80f2d109869e8ff82c23a290067d7d76b1b2bdb36f8e86/#lim but I have no idea how to use it yet…