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Dtube – A decentralized video platform using STEEM and IPFS

d.tube

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Re: Dtube – A decentralized video platform using STEEM and IPFS

#71

Post by baby »

TekMol wrote: post #36

Ok, so I'm looking at a website that tells me it's decentralized. But from all I can tell this is just a good old website. Somebody has control over the domain name. Points it to servers of his choice. And the servers deliver content of his choice. What's decentralized about it?

If it's a DAPP you could theoretically save the .html file and just open it locally. If they've implemented some of the logic on the back end, then you can't... unless what they're doing is public and you can pretty much implement your own client.

Re: Dtube – A decentralized video platform using STEEM and IPFS

#72

Post by mmjaa »

bringtheaction wrote: post #34
mmjaa wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>whales Thus, the importance of community. We all yearn for a return to the era of community-oriented sites, built by enthusiasts and maintained by the life-force of real people, whose intentions are not commercial in nature but rather community oriented. So, I look forward to the eventual retiring of this heinous term, "whales". It is the community that matters.

For a community whose intentions are not commercial why would they need a crypto currency baked into the voting aspect? In other words, is it reasonable to expect STEEM to not primarily attract those with commercial intentions?

Communities engage in forms of exchange. If I were using this to communicate with other members, for example interested in retro computing, it'd be nice to have a way of exchanging hardware with each other, with some kind of economic exchange to fit.

Its not unreasonable to give people - no matter whether their intentions are commercial or otherwise - a means of safe exchange of value, without commercialising that exchange. Or, is it?

Re: Dtube – A decentralized video platform using STEEM and IPFS

#73

Post by mailshanx »

synctext wrote: post #22
RandomInteger4 wrote: post #12

Steem looked like an interesting idea, but your content lives and dies with the platform's whales, which are either insiders or a few people who believe in the platform. If the whales don't interact with your content, you're not likely to get much revenue. You voting power -- the amount you contribute to content you interact with -- is directly tied to your steem power, so unless you put money into the platform or ma…

> Also worth noting that the whole steem platform on the currency end of things is completely centralized This is a central Youtube-like clone it seems. I can't scale in bandwidth and has a central governance model. Plus the coin is worthless: "The number of Steem available is set to double annually, making its supply growth exponential - a possible drag on its future value in the market" https://www.investopedia.com…

Is there a link to your project?

Re: Dtube – A decentralized video platform using STEEM and IPFS

#74

Post by TekMol »

baby wrote: post #71
TekMol wrote: post #36

Ok, so I'm looking at a website that tells me it's decentralized. But from all I can tell this is just a good old website. Somebody has control over the domain name. Points it to servers of his choice. And the servers deliver content of his choice. What's decentralized about it?

If it's a DAPP you could theoretically save the .html file and just open it locally. If they've implemented some of the logic on the back end, then you can't... unless what they're doing is public and you can pretty much implement your own client.

I can save the html of any website. How does that make it 'decentralized'?

Re: Dtube – A decentralized video platform using STEEM and IPFS

#75

Post by DennisP »

synctext wrote: post #24
rebuilder wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this instance, heavy inflation might actually be a plus for STEEM. This is because it doesn't appear to be intended as a store of value, but as an influence market. As far as I can tell - and I'm sure there's a lot I've misunderstood - STEEM is essentially a market for on-line influence. You gain STEEM for upvotes etc. and the more STEEM tokens you have (STEEM Power), the more influence you have in terms of who ge…

> Now, this sounds kind of pyramid-y Unlimited money creation is never sustainable, history shows. An online attention coin can't change economics. The future of television probably is not build on a high inflation economy or destructive hyperinflation. https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=high+inflation+~economy

It sounds like they're not trying to create general-purpose money. They've made a token to track influence. They use inflation so old stored influence loses half its value every year. You can't rest on your laurels, if you want influence you have to have provided value recently.

Re: Dtube – A decentralized video platform using STEEM and IPFS

#76

Post by TekMol »

arghwhat wrote: post #64
hobofan wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, DTube, like most projects related to STEEM still have a high degree of centralization. This reddit comment gives a good evaluation of DTube: https://www.reddit.com/r/dtube/comments/7ysdn1/how_distribut... So most parts of it could at their core be used in a distributed fashion, but are actually accessed via CDNs. E.g. you could use ipfs-companion[0] to alter all instances of ipfs.io URLs to point to a local IPFS…

This solution might make a lot of sense as a build-up process. However, until DTube release a client so that the network can build, it's just a centralized video platform using IPFS and STEEM as storage backends. Unless clients are made available, it might as well use S3 and Postgres.

If it uses IPFS as a storage backend, then why is it faster to watch the video on the website then via IPFS as hobofan did? This seems to be an indication they store that data on a server all the time.

Re: Dtube – A decentralized video platform using STEEM and IPFS

#77

Post by TekMol »

hobofan wrote: post #68
leoc wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In a transitional phase to a distributed web I'd expect a lot of websites to employ a similar approach of using CDNs at first (since not everybode has local nodes running) I'd like to think so, but a more cynical take is that efforts like this to trade on 'distributed' will either (and most likely) fail or, if they do get traction, ditch the distributed backend once it's served its purpose as a selling-point to att…

TBH, I'm not sure how big of a future video "platforms" will even have. With IPFS+Filecoin and a few other parts, it might become quite trivial to host your own video content. With that the focus could possibly shift to platforms like Patreon, and if the payment parts of that can be commoditized (via things like Stellar and SatoshiPay), maybe even back to the good old website. One can only dream...

    With IPFS+Filecoin and a few other parts, it
    might become quite trivial to host your own
    video content.
Using Filecoin means you are not hosting it yourself.

Re: Dtube – A decentralized video platform using STEEM and IPFS

#78

Post by StreamBright »

TekMol wrote: post #36

Ok, so I'm looking at a website that tells me it's decentralized. But from all I can tell this is just a good old website. Somebody has control over the domain name. Points it to servers of his choice. And the servers deliver content of his choice. What's decentralized about it?

This is exactly right. Most of the people who I asked the same question does not even understand the implication using any DNS names. I think decentralized if the new buzzword that everybody is throwing around especially crypto guys for no good reason.

Re: Dtube – A decentralized video platform using STEEM and IPFS

#79

Post by ryukafalz »

xstartup wrote: post #70

I wonder if IPFS can be connected to Cloudflare such that CF ends up acting like a CDN for IPFS network. The content is encrypted (so that the CF does not know what's being served) and users can offer their own Cloudflare API keys to take part in the network. Edit: Please tell me why the downvotes.

You're likely being downvoted because IPFS is already effectively a decentralized CDN. By adding CloudFlare in the mix, you've just re-centralized it - in other words, you've defeated the entire purpose of the platform.

Re: Dtube – A decentralized video platform using STEEM and IPFS

#80

Post by diggan »

TekMol wrote: post #76
arghwhat wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This solution might make a lot of sense as a build-up process. However, until DTube release a client so that the network can build, it's just a centralized video platform using IPFS and STEEM as storage backends. Unless clients are made available, it might as well use S3 and Postgres.

If it uses IPFS as a storage backend, then why is it faster to watch the video on the website then via IPFS as hobofan did? This seems to be an indication they store that data on a server all the time.

By default, when making requests to the HTTP gateway, it'll cache the content requested until a GC runs. So it's possible that the local node you're using, have not seen the content before so it needs to go out and fetch it while the gateway d.tube uses, already has the content fetched and only needs to serve it.

Of course, the second time you load the content (or if another node on your local network already loaded it) via a local node, it'll be much faster than the public gateway d.tube is running.

Disclaimer: I work for Protocol Labs specifically on IPFS.

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