I love that all the centralized social media networks are scrambling to become shitty for profits right around the time users are realizing that they don’t need centralized servers to host their user-generated content. Users can take their content wherever they want and let these platforms die.
Maybe we don’t need 4K 60FPS video to show Mr. Beast giving away more crap. Just because we can up the quality, doesn’t mean we should. Or maybe client-side real-time AI upscaling will make this a non-issue.
Call me old fashioned but I’d rather see high native quality available for when it is relevant. If I’m watching gameplay footage (as one example) I would look at the render quality.
With more and more video games already trying to use frame generation and upscaling within the engine, at what point is too much data loss? Depending on upscaling again during playback means that you video experience might depend on which vendor you have - for example, an Nvidia computer may upscale differently from an Intel laptop with no DGPU vs an Android running on 15% battery.
That would become even more prominent if you’re evaluating how different upscaling technologies look in a given video game, perhaps with an intent to buy different hardware. I check in on how different hardware encoders keep up with each other with a similar research method. That’s a problem that native high resolution video doesn’t have.
I recognize this is one example and that there is content where quality isn’t paramount and frame gen and upscaling are relevant - but I’m not ready to throw out an entire sector of media for this kind of gain on some media. Not to mention that not everyone is going to have access to the kind of hardware required to cleanly upscale, and adding upscaling to everything (for everyone who’s not using their PS5/Xbox/PC as a set top media player) is just going to drive up the cost of already very expensive consumer electronics and add yet another point of failure to a TV that didn’t need to be smart to begin with.
The quality is something that depends on the content. If the video is just someone talking, 4K is overkill. And not every gameplay has to be recorded forever. Only the good ones. And even the videos can be rescaled after some time if nobody sees them.
This 100%.
Look at forums. Back in the early days, there were lots of little independent forums. Sites like Reddit took over because you could easily keep your identity across multiple forums and see the content from all your communities on one page.
We gained convenience, but didn’t think too hard about what we were losing or who we were losing it to. Then along came enshittification and we are collectively realizing what we lost.
Federation is of course the solution.
As I see it, the only missing piece is monetization. Platforms like YouTube make it easy to monetize page views, Twitter / X is doing the same. That’s much harder in the fediverse.
Ads suck. And honestly, if we had less content creators, they’d be fine. There are a lot of absolutely degenerates out there. Let’s cull the herd a bit and let us speak individually with our wallets.
That’s a fair point.
Patreon, or whatever comes next, needs to drastically reduce friction. That by the way is why Amazon is so successful, reducing purchase friction.
Right now if you have something that a million people will take for free, and you start to charge just one penny for it, your audience of a million will drop to like 12. Not because people don’t want to spend a penny, but because they don’t want to fill out a form and put in their name address credit card number expiration date security code phone number email address etc. If there was a button they could click that was like ‘instant donate 5 cents’ most people would click that a lot.
The closest thing I’ve heard to that was a crypto called basic attention token, which aimed to do just that. They are making a big mistake though in that they are only integrating with Brave browser rather than making a universal plug-in. So the idea of a universal solution is still a ways off I guess.
But I think to make it zero friction it will have to be crypto based in some way.
you could easily keep your identity across multiple forums and see the content from all your communities on one page
RSS feeds have provided this experience for years. The problem is that a lot of sites stopped serving RSS feeds for their content. But sites like rss.app and openrss can be used to get RSS feeds for sites that don’t have them.
RSS is great for content consumption. It’s a shame that many sites stopped serving it- same thing with podcasts, now everyone wants you to listen on this or that platform instead of just publishing a normal RSS feed full of MP3 files.
That said though, RSS doesn’t help for participation, it’s a one-way tech.
I guess if you have forums that put out RSS feeds you could aggregate them together for post titles, but that’s still clumsy. Lemmy does it much more elegantly.
My understanding of RSS is that it’s basically a list of metadata and links for content… Its always seemed to me to be a great way to aggregate the content you want to see. He did specifically mention keeping an Identity across multiple forums and I’m not aware of any RSS implementation that provides that functionality though… are you? That’s a huge feature to miss if we’re talking about social link aggregators like Reddit and Lemmy.
One of the main advantages of RSS is that it doesn’t track you or require an account for it to work. As you said it’s only a XML or JSON file wth the latest items posted on the website.
Yeah, sorry I was specifically replying to part about seeing the content from communities (or everything on the internet, really) in one view. Keeping your identity across multiple forums is platform-specific and would be solved by Lemmy directly. RSS feeds would just give you the updates and the links directly to the content. But once you click through to go to each website, you’d just be using your already-logged-in state on the platform.
It’s like we’re reverting to the days you would go to homestarrunner.com, illwillpress, etc to see content from people you actually wanted to see content from. Honestly looking forward to it
I love that all the centralized social media networks are scrambling to become shitty for profits right around the time users are realizing that they don’t need centralized servers to host their user-generated content. Users can take their content wherever they want and let these platforms die.
I’m not sure if we manage to do the same for video though; hosting these costs a lot more.
Maybe we don’t need 4K 60FPS video to show Mr. Beast giving away more crap. Just because we can up the quality, doesn’t mean we should. Or maybe client-side real-time AI upscaling will make this a non-issue.
Call me old fashioned but I’d rather see high native quality available for when it is relevant. If I’m watching gameplay footage (as one example) I would look at the render quality.
With more and more video games already trying to use frame generation and upscaling within the engine, at what point is too much data loss? Depending on upscaling again during playback means that you video experience might depend on which vendor you have - for example, an Nvidia computer may upscale differently from an Intel laptop with no DGPU vs an Android running on 15% battery.
That would become even more prominent if you’re evaluating how different upscaling technologies look in a given video game, perhaps with an intent to buy different hardware. I check in on how different hardware encoders keep up with each other with a similar research method. That’s a problem that native high resolution video doesn’t have.
I recognize this is one example and that there is content where quality isn’t paramount and frame gen and upscaling are relevant - but I’m not ready to throw out an entire sector of media for this kind of gain on some media. Not to mention that not everyone is going to have access to the kind of hardware required to cleanly upscale, and adding upscaling to everything (for everyone who’s not using their PS5/Xbox/PC as a set top media player) is just going to drive up the cost of already very expensive consumer electronics and add yet another point of failure to a TV that didn’t need to be smart to begin with.
The quality is something that depends on the content. If the video is just someone talking, 4K is overkill. And not every gameplay has to be recorded forever. Only the good ones. And even the videos can be rescaled after some time if nobody sees them.
I mean, didn’t Vine fail even with mostly low-quality videos? I’m assuming even 720p could be a challenge for a decentralized site.EDIT: Apparently I was misremembering
It didn’t fail, twitter shut it down
I distinctly remember reading that on somewhere reputable but it seems you’re right. Thanks for the fact check.
This 100%. Look at forums. Back in the early days, there were lots of little independent forums. Sites like Reddit took over because you could easily keep your identity across multiple forums and see the content from all your communities on one page. We gained convenience, but didn’t think too hard about what we were losing or who we were losing it to. Then along came enshittification and we are collectively realizing what we lost. Federation is of course the solution. As I see it, the only missing piece is monetization. Platforms like YouTube make it easy to monetize page views, Twitter / X is doing the same. That’s much harder in the fediverse.
Patreon for monification?
Ads suck. And honestly, if we had less content creators, they’d be fine. There are a lot of absolutely degenerates out there. Let’s cull the herd a bit and let us speak individually with our wallets.
That’s a fair point. Patreon, or whatever comes next, needs to drastically reduce friction. That by the way is why Amazon is so successful, reducing purchase friction. Right now if you have something that a million people will take for free, and you start to charge just one penny for it, your audience of a million will drop to like 12. Not because people don’t want to spend a penny, but because they don’t want to fill out a form and put in their name address credit card number expiration date security code phone number email address etc. If there was a button they could click that was like ‘instant donate 5 cents’ most people would click that a lot.
The closest thing I’ve heard to that was a crypto called basic attention token, which aimed to do just that. They are making a big mistake though in that they are only integrating with Brave browser rather than making a universal plug-in. So the idea of a universal solution is still a ways off I guess. But I think to make it zero friction it will have to be crypto based in some way.
RSS feeds have provided this experience for years. The problem is that a lot of sites stopped serving RSS feeds for their content. But sites like rss.app and openrss can be used to get RSS feeds for sites that don’t have them.
RSS is great for content consumption. It’s a shame that many sites stopped serving it- same thing with podcasts, now everyone wants you to listen on this or that platform instead of just publishing a normal RSS feed full of MP3 files.
That said though, RSS doesn’t help for participation, it’s a one-way tech.
I guess if you have forums that put out RSS feeds you could aggregate them together for post titles, but that’s still clumsy. Lemmy does it much more elegantly.
My understanding of RSS is that it’s basically a list of metadata and links for content… Its always seemed to me to be a great way to aggregate the content you want to see. He did specifically mention keeping an Identity across multiple forums and I’m not aware of any RSS implementation that provides that functionality though… are you? That’s a huge feature to miss if we’re talking about social link aggregators like Reddit and Lemmy.
One of the main advantages of RSS is that it doesn’t track you or require an account for it to work. As you said it’s only a XML or JSON file wth the latest items posted on the website.
Yeah, sorry I was specifically replying to part about seeing the content from communities (or everything on the internet, really) in one view. Keeping your identity across multiple forums is platform-specific and would be solved by Lemmy directly. RSS feeds would just give you the updates and the links directly to the content. But once you click through to go to each website, you’d just be using your already-logged-in state on the platform.
It’s like we’re reverting to the days you would go to homestarrunner.com, illwillpress, etc to see content from people you actually wanted to see content from. Honestly looking forward to it
Great Jorb!
I said you did a great jeeeeaaaeeeeoooooorrrrrrrrrrrrrb!