VPN has absolutely nothing to do with hosting a video platform, no clue why you even bring it up.

Debrids is just a file download service, isn’t it? But even if it was a video hosting platform, a single server would never be enough. You need at least two (as a fall back). Then you need dynamic scaling for bigger user numbers, which works just fine for CPU and RAM (or even GPU resources), but doesn’t work for storage. So you need extra storage somewhere all servers have access to, but when it comes to videos you’d be paying millions in no time.

So you need your own cheap storage and datacenters around the world. And CDNs on top to serve your content worldwide (otherwise the experience would suck on another continent if your server is too far away).

Look up how Google does it, they have their own data storage centers. And if your video is crappy and you’re a nobody, it probably gets stored in a slower location on-demand. So it also loads slower. But if your video is in high-demand with millions of views it gets pushed into a more accessible location (and gets higher priority for CDNs). It’s not just hosting, there is a massive amount of logic and software behind the stack.

I pay a very small fee for debrid and VPN servers that offer exactly the same server capacity with enormous bandwidth and virtually no downtime.

Did you just compare your small private server with YouTube’s infrastructure? Jesus Christ.

Google had already been paying about 2 million a month for bandwidth in 2015 or so.

I work for a larger company as a software developer, even with a billion in gross sales, there is absolutely no chance to provide even a tenth of YouTube’s service. Especially for free (without paywalls). The company would go bust in two years.

demanding they pay for a service that is worse than what adblockers already offer

Or you could say they have tolerated adblockers until now and allowed you to use their service without a paywall. Yes, it sucks, we’re used to blocking ads, but it was like having free lunch.

whilst also running a business that relies solely on critical mass of users rather than any actual value that youtube themselves can uniquely provide

There have been plenty of other platforms who tried to do what YouTube did, they all failed. YouTube provides a massive infrastructure, about one hour of video is getting uploaded to their servers every second. And it must be kept around, so the amount of data only goes up. A total nobody can upload a 100 hours of video and YouTube will gladly accept that and still make those videos available 5 years from now.

To say they don’t provide a relatively unique (or at least very difficult) service is insanity.

Not sure what kind of shit take that is if you bought a $70 game recently (Baldur’s Gate 3, even I’m waiting for a sale and money is not tight for me), you have cats and probably a Nintendo Switch with Zelda, that’s just what I read on the first page of your profile. So you obviously have money to spend on entertainment, like most adults.

$20 is clearly too much just to get rid of ads (though it also gets you YouTube Music, like Spotify), but I was talking about content creators who can easily afford this. And most people spend hours on YouTube, probably more time than they use Netflix if we’re being honest.

I don’t like Google either, but at some point they need to make money. That’s the simple truth. If everyone used adblockers we’d see a lot more content locked down behind a paywall. It is what it is. Then you either pay or you find some other source of content.

And let’s be real, people pay for entertainment. If I go outside and throw a stone it would probably hit someone with a Netflix/HBO/Disney+/Spotify/Prime or whatever subscription. It’s difficult to find a person who doesn’t have Netflix for example. If Google forces this through YouTube will just be another subscription service (or you get ads). Or they start limiting uploads to save on cost, which would actually kill their platform (as probably 99% of uploaded videos are barely or never watched, around one hour of video per second is getting uploaded right now).

Yeah, show me how to not get into debt and be able to afford both land and a house. People usually don’t have half a million+ lying around burning a hole in their pockets.

Dude, it’s at most 20 bucks a month to get rid of all ads (with YouTube music on top). Any creator who has some following can pay that from pocket change. The big content creators (1M+ subscribers) pull in millions with a mix of ad money and sponsorships. And it would be a business expense on top for them…

Creators are the last person to actually care about YouTube forced ads, it’s their job, they can afford it easily.

The only ones really impacted are power users, people who use adblock right now to watch. Which would also include me. But what do you want to do? There is no other platform, if they block adblockers I either have to watch ads or finally pay them money. I’m not going to leave for another platform because there is none. Twitch is there, sure, but it’s only for livestreams and awful for VODs.

You do realize the average person watches YouTube on their TV or their phone, with ads? You are not the target audience for Google.

So I fully expect YouTube to kill adblocking at some point and they might lose what? 10% of users? Of which 5% either come back to watch ads or pay the subscription because all the content is on there?

I’m 100% pro adblocker, the internet is a mess without, but it’s stupid to think YouTube wouldn’t cut you off the moment you don’t provide any benefit to their service (For example despite adblocking you might give Superchat money to streamers, or join Streamer memberships).

Nah, Diablo 4 is much more fun when leveling from 1 to 70 or so. 70 - 100 is just doing the same things over and over with barely any rewards. It’s the other way around there, leveling is fun, endgame is dogshit.

Usually “game starts at max level” is used for MMOs like WoW. Where all the leveling is seen as annoying bullshit fetch quests and at max level you do dungeons and raids.

The story or the gameplay? Because all I wanted to do was play a fun MMO, get items and do dungeons with other people. Instead I did quests like hit 3 rocks with your basic ability. Great! Hit 3 more rocks with the same ability. Done? Now run between 4 NPCs and talk with each of them. Great, now kill 8 enemies over there. Run back, talk with 2 more NPCs. Run through the city and interact with 8 lamp posts, the interaction takes several seconds each, because why not? …

I really tried to power through this absolute bullshit, but after a few hours I simply gave up. It only got worse, not better.

As you say Heavensward, I still hear that there is a ton of dumb quests then. Like the story is right at a critical point and they send you off on hours of fetch quests before you can continue?

The story or the gameplay? Because all I wanted to do was play a fun MMO, get items and do dungeons with other people. Instead I did quests like hit 3 rocks with your basic ability. Great! Hit 3 more rocks with the same ability. Done? Now run between 4 NPCs and talk with each of them. Great, now kill 8 enemies over there. Run back, talk with 2 more NPCs. Run through the city and interact with 8 lamp posts, the interaction takes several seconds each, because why not? …

I really tried to power through this absolute bullshit, but after a few hours I simply gave up. It only got worse, not better.

Not just for series, this is the same with games.

“The first 50 hours of Final Fantasy 14 suck, but the expansions afterwards are worth it!”

“The game starts at max level!”

I can’t stand it. And it’s not like the game magically gets much better, it just feels pretty okay for someone who just wasted months of their time on the bad parts. Of course you’ll enjoy mediocre parts later on after suffering through that crap.

A game has to start being fun ten minutes after the tutorial tops. Why play it otherwise?

Seriously? Breaking Bad was awesome all things considered. But if you are not hooked by season 1 you won’t like it, period.

The middle part of the series was a drag, too many filler episodes. Strong start, strong end, but if you don’t like the start don’t even bother.

I’m only upvoting this so I’m not the only one today who regrets to have eyes.

I personally like to keep it on. Most of my messaging is with family and friends and it’s good to know if someone read or hasn’t read my message.

Especially if things are time critical. Picking someone up? Asking if they need anything from the supermarket? If I see that they read the message I know that they are going to reply in a moment. If they didn’t even read the message I won’t have to wait around / can guess that they are currently in the car or wherever.

Sometimes you also have a spotty connection, so the received + read receipt can tell you if they actually got your message.

In general if someone sends me a message and I read it… I’m going to fucking reply to it (if I’m not super busy, and even then I might send a quick message back). I seriously don’t get people who just leave things on read and then forget about it.

But the NAS is in your house… which basically means if it gets flooded/burns down all your data is gone too.

I already have my data on my PC, a second backup inside the same house isn’t worth that much. But instead of relying on a cloud service I just rent a virtual server (for various things) and use Seafile to keep my data in sync.

PC breaks? House burns down? My data is on my own server in a datacenter. My server gets cancelled? My data is on my PCs.

So even with your NAS you are 100% reliant on a cloud backup still, so why did you get the NAS when you already have a copy of your data on your devices?

On the other hand you can lose your email address at any time if you don’t own the domain. So if Google decides they don’t like something you wrote your @gmail.com address could be gone tomorrow. And with it all your accounts you set up (as you need email usually to login or do changes).

The whole e-mail ecosystem sucks :-/

My self-hosted mail server works fine for now, but that could change at any moment.

Without knowing the actual implementation:

I’d wager comments are preserved and don’t get cleaned up over time. Because if content gets deleted the instance has to federate the deletion to other instances to clean everything up (like an event system). If the instance just vanishes there would be no deletion request happening.

If deletion was automatic when an instance goes down we’d have already lost thousands of comments due to the outages lately :)

That’s the case when an instance just straight up shuts down, right?

But if a user deletes their comment this also gets propagated to other instances. Do instance admins have a nuke button to initiate a delete for all content?

Having 4 active accounts is anything but leaving the platform. Hell, I thought they had a single account they are giving up (like most companies).

What bullshit.

Just fyi: You’re on lemmy.ml, so part of your comment got caught in the slur filter…

Other instances can write and see ‘bitch’ :-/