• 6 Posts
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Joined 1 month ago
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Cake day: February 8th, 2025

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  • When I look at the trending videos on YouTube, it makes me want to become a hermit and have no contact with society, the videos are so bad. I think the money side of YouTube has totally corrupted it.

    As a PeerTube creator, I make videos as a way to teach/inform/entertain, not to make money. One way to make PeerTube work is to find a way to fund the hosts/instances that transcode and store the video files.

    It would be interesting to create a crypto coin and have PeerTube users, both creators and viewers, to buy a small amount of the coin (a few dollars worth) when they register, then each video that they watch costs a small fraction of a coin paid to the instance hosting the video, and the viewer could add a tip to the creator if they liked the video. The amount paid to the instance might be an approximation of the cost to host the video. Accumulating the coin might be a game not an income source for the creators, but there might be enough money to fund the instances with this scheme.

    There certainly is value in quality video that people are willing to pay for. It would be nice to find an alternative to advertising based video.

    Another side of video that YouTube is not doing a good job at is creating community. The comment section is hard to follow, impossible to search, and it is transient, as new videos are created, comments on old videos disappear. I don’t know how to do it, but creating a forum or a lemmy group for each creator or each video interest group with multiple creators involved would be extremely powerful.

















  • We are entering a major transition period, with many technological changes happening to disrupt the existing economy. One of the most important is the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy.

    For hundreds of years, the energy economy has been a system where certain countries and companies controlled the locations on earth where fossil fuels are located, and had the technology to process the fuels. Fossil fuels by their nature require the user to buy “feedstock” as they go. The countries and companies that control fossil fuel production profit from this system and are some of the wealthiest groups in the world.

    Renewable energy systems, such as solar, wind and batteries, require an upfront payment for the equipment. The cost of equipment for renewable energy is dropping every year. They can be located almost everywhere. There is no ongoing feedstock payment. Renewables break the fossil fuel industry model, and some of the wealthiest people in the world are scrambling to control governments to somehow retain their income flow. Currently their strategy is to delay implementation of renewables, but eventually they will try to create monopolies where they control the source of power and charge the customer about the same as they are paying now, with the utilities benefitting from the low cost of renewable power.

    This is only one of the transitions happening at this time. There are many major disruptions coming from implementing AI in the economy, from electric vehicles and self-driving vehicles. There are probably many more transitions that no one is predicting or even imagining at this time. You can expect things to be crazy for a decade or more as these technologies change the way our economy, infrastructure and society is shaped.