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  • myrmepropagandistfuturebird@sauropods.win
    Aug 2, 2026, 11:09 AM

    The mission of the video platform has to be about independence and FOSS but that's not enough. It also has to be about building an ad-free framework for viral (yes viral, popular) content.

    What I think we have now are alternatives that work fine as long as you aren't popular. I think in the alt-net we have a kind of contempt for popular viral things, because so often the drive to make them is serving ads or being nefarious.

    We really need to get over that.

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Replies

  • myrmepropagandistfuturebird@sauropods.win
    Aug 2, 2026, 11:14 AM

    I know how to make content that "pops off" and I seriously considered taking my ant videos in that direction. But I knew it would make me miserable. I knew I'd need to lean into things like scary thumbnails and sensational titles.

    On my videos that did well I loved answering questions about ants in the comments. I loved how curious people were about these little creatures that are all around us. That made me so happy.

    Right now there isn't a platform that's a good fit for what I want to do.

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  • myrmepropagandistfuturebird@sauropods.win
    Aug 2, 2026, 11:31 AM

    To make a video about ants popular it'd need to tap into the sense of fear that many people have of insects. With fear comes fascination. It can be a great starting place for education.

    Kids always want to know "Which ants sting? Can an ant kill you?" first. This used to disappoint me but now I just see it as an exciting jumping off point.

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  • myrmepropagandistfuturebird@sauropods.win
    Aug 2, 2026, 11:31 AM

    There is a certain kind of youTube guy who makes his money getting bitten by various insects. Some of the spider people have done a great job starting with that "fear factor" but pivoting to education and I admire that kind of work.

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  • myrmepropagandistfuturebird@sauropods.win
    Aug 2, 2026, 11:23 AM

    @ehproque

    listen bub aphids have got to be the LEAST woke creatures on the planet. They aren't awake at all, they are... beyonde asleep.

    I've watched a ladybird eat an aphid and the creature didn't flee, didn't stop eating. I really wondered if it noticed that it was dead.

    Could that be a definition of life? Living things notice when they die.

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  • ocnurbocnurb@woof.group
    Aug 2, 2026, 11:34 AM

    @futurebird I once was made to teach unwilling children about spreadsheets. It's not hard to imagine how well this started. However, having created someone's budget, they got a lot more interested when we went Sim City disaster mode and modelled an expensive life crisis.

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  • Bjørnar (he/him)btuftin@social.coop
    Aug 2, 2026, 1:49 PM

    @futurebird In Norway ants only bite, and you can hold a purple Hepatica nobilis flower over an anthill and see it turn pink when the ants spray it with formic acid.

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  • AJ Sadauskasaj@gts.sadauskas.id.au
    Aug 2, 2026, 11:26 AM

    @futurebird As I understand it, PeerTube is designed to get around this by being a peer-to-peer network of servers.

    Say you upload a copy of your ant video on server A.

    It's really popular! 100,000 people watch it!

    With PeerTube, let's suppose 25,000 of those people have an account on server B. Another 25,000 are on server C. Another 25,000 on server D. And another 25,000 on server E.

    Server A needs to send the video once to server B, once to server C, once to server D, and once to server E.

    It's then up to those servers and their respective users as to how to cover the bandwidth costs.

    At scale, perhaps one could be ad-based, one is paid, one is run by a university and subsidised through student fees (or funding), and one's run by donations.

    Each to their needs, each by their means!

    And yes, I know this is a gross oversimplification! But if you have a distributed server model, then one viral video doesn't necessarily mean excessive bandwidth costs for the server you upload it to.

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  • Janne Morenjannem@fosstodon.org
    Aug 2, 2026, 11:57 AM

    @aj @futurebird
    A lot of viewers aren't members though. Peertube instances really need to prevent visitors from playing videos.

    But if you do that, few people are going to sign up.

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  • Lealeadore@sunny.garden
    Aug 2, 2026, 6:36 PM

    @jannem
    >"Peertube instances really need to prevent visitors from playing videos."

    But the people watching the video are also serving it at the same time, taking part of the load off the server. That's why it shows that warning message "your IP address may be revealed" when you watch one.

    How much of the load each viewer shares and how much it helps, I don't know enough to say. The idea is that the more people are watching, the more load their peer-to-peer sharing is taking off the server.

    Also, as more people watch a video, it gets copied to more servers and spreads the load that way as well.

    @aj @futurebird

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  • K M Lawrencekludgekml@sunbeam.city
    Aug 2, 2026, 5:10 PM

    @aj @futurebird yes, I was going to say that one of the problems with viral content is that it's unpredictable, therefore hard for smaller platforms to cope with (in a way, centralisation helps a bit with this, because there's always _something_ on fire on YouTube or TikTok so predicting a traffic spike just means waiting a minute, plus they've got low traffic from millions of people so their networks have to be able to cope with constant high traffic anyway). The peertube solution of a fan out plus potential peer-to-peer torrents seems quite clever.

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