- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
Google Play has delisted UpScrolled, the “censorship-resistant” social media app founded by Issam Hijazi, following its rapid growth to over 2.5 million users and its brief stint as a top-ranked alternative to TikTok.
While the app remains available for existing users, Google has not provided a specific reason for the removal; UpScrolled’s team confirmed they are working with the Play Store for reinstatement while maintaining their commitment to unfiltered content.
This development follows the app’s rapid ascent in popularity, particularly amid concerns over content moderation on competing platforms like TikTok.
I switched to Vivaldi and Ecosia, barely notice a difference.
Ecosia is OK, but if you use Vivaldi (I’m guessing it’s Chromium) you will give power to Google. If we want to fight Google, there are three main areas.
1 - The most important is search (fortunately they suck and it’s easy to change).
2 - The second most important is Chromium (there is only one alternative, Firefox - I don’t count Safari because it’s for Apple devices). Firefox has Manifest V2; if we lose this, we lose great power.
3 - The third most important is YouTube. I think this is the hardest one because maintaining a video-sharing platform is very expensive, and it’s not something that can live just with donations.
Vivaldi also kept Manifest V2, so old extensions do keep working there. They also have a mastodon server, and email/calendar/feeds, so they offer more out of the box than Firefox. Lots of projects built on other open source projects like Chromium and KDE do offer legitimate alternatives.
YouTube has to be replaced with a decentralized torrent-like based system where every user shares the load with what they are watching.
this could be great for popular content
It would be a great solution for most media only because computers are so fast and have excellent connections nowadays. I think if everyone just hosts their own content through a system like this we can preserve even niche content.
Obviously there would be some serious technical hurdles such as search. It wouldn’t be a magic bullet, but a good compromise to the top-down Monopoly we have now.
This is very good idea but we’d need domains for that
For #3, how much would it actually cost to host a medium sized YouTube channel on peertube? I top off my prepaid hosting costs every few years to cover my website’s remarkably high traffic (just me and a few other people :P). Consequently I have no idea how much it would cost to self host a site with actual visitors and video content.
I guess too much because think like you have 1000 videos each video is ~500 mb (also you’ll need to store 144p, 240p, 360p, 480p, 720p versions) let’s say 1 GB storage for each video, total storage need: 1TB just for one channel it’s ok but there would be like 10k channel at least
1 TB * 10000 = 20 TB * 500 = 500 hard disk with 20 TB
let’s say each one is $350 total $175,000 (and this is hard disk I thing you’re not going to use hard disks)
(and this is just storage I don’t know about traffic costs)
You are probably right that low quality clickbait, or ultra long-form content couldn’t survive under that model. Also, the recodes and regional hosting for sites with a global reach adds cost.
With that said, I wonder if the economics work out better for a group of people who share an interest and want to cultivate a community around it. All 10k channels don’t need to go on one server. For me, I think being decentralized is a key part of the benefit. I see the folks on urbanists.video doing the peertube thing very well. I talked to them a while back because I couldn’t find a way to pitch in for server costs and it sounded like they were self-funding while they figured out their open collective. We’re limited on what we can learn from them because the viewcounts aren’t in YouTube’s ballpark and the creators post both places and probably owe a lot of their exposure to the YouTube algorithm rather than Peertube. Nevertheless, the Urbanism folks have sown the seeds to get out from under YouTube’s thumb and Google themselves will water that seed by enshittifying their own product. I’m curious to see it continue to develop.
Does anyone around here run a Peertube?
The real cost of a centralized platform like YouTube also includes giving up the freedom of communities to set their own standards, and while it isn’t a monetary cost, I think it’s worth careful consideration.
It could be a good thing to have an internet with less slop and more high quality content produced by people and for people. How we decide that will likely be contentious. I’m sure there’s some very rich people out there who would be thrilled if poor people couldn’t afford to be heard outside their own communities.
Not everything is worth the disk space it’s saved on (and 3 backups of course). YouTube has become increasingly filled with such content. That AI generated listical video of the 10 best ways to painlessly pluck nose hairs probably won’t make the cut. If users have some skin in the game, if it feels like their space and their communities again, perhaps things will improve.
Some sort of torrent tube that let’s you seed what you star react could be a useful way of giving videos wider reach as they gain popularity within an organic community. Upvotes would mean something if every upvote stored a 1MB video fragment on your device for seeding.