tl;dr (even this is long ug): need halp from my fellow anarchists (~5-10) who happen to also share content with the world! Read the requirements section and then post a response. I figured this was the best place to reach out, I checked in with @db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com before posting, and we didnt have a better idea for a comm so here I am. =)
For those who volunteer and help, I’ll be giving a much more detailed overview of how the system will work and what each part will do and why.
Some of the details about how the system will work that I’ll be giving those selected, I’d appreciate being kept confidential. I want you informed but I also would appreciate the ability to surprise and delight everyone when things are released and to build the system at my pace without worry especially in the initial year while I get the base features working.
Requirements
- you’ve been a member lemmy.dbzer0.com community for 3+ months. (this isnt strict but i will be checking)
- willing to keep the system details confidential. I’ll be explicit about which and why.
- reply with ‘I’m Interested’ and include some information about you.
- you dont need to include your technical / work information like I did. That information is relevant from me because I’m building the software and its directly applicable.
- by responding with an assertion of your interest you’re asserting you fit the bill. your post is a vibe check, be weird, lord knows I fucking am.
- you run linux, It’ll support macosx/windows eventually just not there yet.
- confident in self hosting / linux administration. while I plan on stream lining everything for the general usage its early yet.
- are familiar with torrenting ecosystems.
- able to safely setup and run a torrent client for whatever you’re using it for.
- comfortable with buggy software. im literally building the ship while sailing.
- comfortable with slow update processes come august when my sabbatical ends.
- comfortable with software that will require a full state resets as it evolves. I’ll obviously try to minimizes these but there is a whole storage layer aspect I’ll need to get to at some point that will require a backup and restore.
Why I’m doing this
- primarily the rise of fascism is going to require non-techy and user friendly anonymous media distribution.
- I believe most (all?) the media platforms on the market are exploitative instead of communal and they suffer as a result.
- I’ve been extremely bored technically lately.
- I need (emotionally) to be able to do the crazy ideas I have in a number of areas in ML/distributed systems/security.
- I’m tired of my technical know how being used to build things I dislike/disapprove of.
- no company/investors are willing to pay me to do this, since they highly dislike not having control of an ecosystem, see the exploitative comments above.
- I want people and content producers to have a space to share together that’s mutually beneficial: producers give up their content to the system and get paid on an ongoing basis. Consumers provide the distribution (free tier), and capital (subscription which enables at cost storage feature) that support everything. The worker collective will be able to fund off the margins.
a little about me:
- I’m a principal engineer specializing in non-linear dynamic systems. (systems that function off random processes in lay terms, its essentially the math that underpins the intersection of crypto/AI/distributed computing)
- I primarily work in startups helping companies go from ideation to real world working systems.
- I dabble in biochemistry and medicine. (currently picking up a BSN for humanitarian work).
- I’m heavily neurodivergent, I was literally one of the case studies children in the 90s for research. take that as you will.
- I enjoy taking things apart to see how they tick. if its a system that does something interesting I literally devour information about it…
- I love niche communities, you’ll find me in my home town palling around with the LGBTQ+, fetish groups and often in drag on relevant holidays or just to fuck with people. You won’t see pictures of me in tights with a riced linux system though. ;)
What I’m building
- a media player that has torrent protocol builtin implements bep51 for content discovery, rss feeds.
- tracker agnostic. use whatever tracker you want.
- will be daily usable by EO july, but the more complicated stuff will be later.
- the daemon / UX code will be released under AGPL v3 for personal use post this private alpha/beta. No commercial use will be permitted with the single exception of the non-profit I’ll be founding as an entity at some point. the non profit will be a worker collective.
- will have a flatpak/debian/pacman installer, in flatpak its containerized essentially by default but will support native package manager installs.
- is efficient of resource utilization. I want it to run efficiently on something like the raspberry pi. its not there yet obviously and some of the initial models won’t.
- builtin user space VPN client, wireguard protocol, not implemented yet, hopefully by end of year. which means essentially it can setup a VPN inside its program memory space without affecting your entire system and will work with any wireguard VPN provider.
- personalized content filtering. everything here is controlled client side. nothing is uploaded anywhere. but it’ll have builtin filters for content genres, NSFW, etc.
- ability to stream your archived to devices, including mobile, while away from home.
- anonymous recommendations from your peer network (people in the network you subscribe to essentially, but you wont know who it came from) providing virality of content discovery without allowing abuses by larger players in the ecosystem. nothing is sent off your device for this.
the hard part of what I plan on building (1-2yr for everything I think):
- everything below here is opt in. But the storage alone will make it worth while.
- the system Im imagining is designed so only the verified content publishers will be able to determine how much time you’ve spent watching their particular content. and only the metadata for these providers will be sent off your device to my systems by default. The system will only be able to de-anonymize this metadata during the monthly payout to those producers.
- primarily these things are to fund the content creators, if my idea works 100% of the subscription costs (less the damn fees for the processing) will be given to the content providers in the system. however that requires a minimum number of users before thats possible.
Opt-in subscription tiers
I have a bunch of ideas planned and they’re mostly self funding. the subscriptions (long term) are primarily to do payouts to content creators. but initially until economics of scale kick in at 1k subscribers at the base tier will let me do this full time.
- no min seeding ratio in the the default DHT for the application.
- publishing tooling for creators to upload and distribute their content to swarms.
- tiers (probably range from $3-$12/month). There are forces outside my control on the floor here (processing fees, ug) but its around $1.
- E2E encrypted cloud storage for files at cost. Only you will be able to retrieve this content. no distribution from the applications systems. basically this is for backups and long term storage.
- automatic subbing/dubbing client side. any models used / built for this will be 100% open sourced.
Opt-in profit shared advertisements
Two things here, first this requires a user base to be effective, so I dont plan anything here for awhile. Second, I hate ads to, primarily because they are almost never relevant to me. On the other hand informational distribution is important. I’d love to see ads for the specific stuff I want to see. My plans here for the profit sharing will ideally be between you the person who saw the ad and publisher the content you watched that month, but i’m not leaving out a small portion going to the non-profit atm, especially initially.
- Im hoping to be able to hit 95-98% of the ads value will be credited to you. 2% to the content creators.
- you’ll be able to directly tailor what you see.
- Im hoping to focus on concerts/festivals/local local community events primarily.
You’re wanting to take the thing that people use precisely because they don’t want to pay anything and trying to make it not only paid, but a subscription service…….not for me but hey I’m always down to see new things get made. Good luck.
Edit: reading your other comments it seems like you’re just selling VPS’s that you’ll be renting off someone else and marking up, and you’ll just run some software on it that will try to combine stuff that already exists and is easy to set up.
nope, 100% incorrect on all counts.
I don’t see anything in here about what the software does or what problem you’re trying to solve
Primarily because I didnt want to spell it out in a public comm. But here we are.
here is an example case for the people here, obviously the total uplink is a consideration but this is just a demonstration:
with the storage offloading: 3TB costs €4.5 / month + €3 euro subscription.= €7.5. Cost difference between those servers: €10.8. using the smaller box + what I’m building it’ll cost €10.50/month and you’ll be able to seed 8TB instead of 6TB. And those economics only improve the bigger the box you’re currently using gets.
On top of all that if we can get enough people on board I can do some really cool things around partial seeding of content. further reducing overall costs for everyone and improving the network.
All the while the archive layer will have no idea what data you’ve uploaded . and you can also upload just misc stuff you want backed up but not shared for far cheaper than the current cloud drive products out there.
So it’s basically cloud storage, but distributed among other users? How do you prevent people from leeching?
That particular aspect literally is just personal cloud storage, its not distributed.
put it this way: you can spend money for a beefy seed box or on a NAS you need to manage or use a signficantly smaller systems and seed significantly more data. making it easier to maintain your ratio, increasing the available within the tracker of data, etc. And spend less money. That’s all I’m willing to say publicly at this time.
People who are eligible and interested (which you arent atm) will be informed of the other details which are far more interesting than these basic aspects.
I don’t think you’re going to get many people interested this way. Nobody is going to say “oh this is exactly what I need” when they don’t know what this is.
Thats fine. either people are interested or their not atm. I just dont have anything to show for a few more weeks. its just barely usable for me.
I dont want to talk about the details here because this is a legal grey area in a public space, like seriously wtf you’re pushing for details on a comm with rules directly protecting it from these exact problems. I was literally trying to give people enough information to have their interest piqued and be curious and raise their hand and have some fun learning about each other. But so far the responses have been like i fucking drowned your pets. 😞 suffice to say, disappointed.
This sounds like a convoluted and worse version of stuff that already exists. Also you can’t have something open source but deny commercial use.
sigh i literally have to spell everything out. my seedbox is significantly smaller, is serving more content, and I’m spending less overall.
i literally have to spell everything out
Yes. You do. That’s just the way it goes.
It doesn’t matter if you’re doing OSS or looking for venture capital, you need to sell your project/product to users. In an OSS project, prospective users need to understand why they should invest their time. You always need an elevator pitch or one liner. In github, the elevator pitch is the “About” section on the right hand side of the page (on desktop).
If you want to see what a good sales job looks like for Open Source, check out hoarder. It’s one of the best I’ve seen and certainly one of the main reasons it has received over 13 thousand stars in about one year.
And I literally spelled that out in the post ‘cloud storage at cost’ in a torrenting daemon. I’ve now also explained how its relevant to people here who couldn’t connect the dots, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Some people asked good questions both here and privately and thats all I was after atm. =)
I’m interested, primarily in the idea that some parts could be useful longer term… I’m an old school Internet janitor, and appreciate the idea that enshittification is a moving target.
I’d ask up front though if you’ve seen or considered Veilid? It might be wise to evaluate working with that as a baseline so a stronger fight against the shit can be had.
Let’s fuck up some fascists.
Awesome! I’ll ping you shortly, probably over the weekend, Im packed rest of the week. I havent seen veilid! But I’ve built similar things in the past, mostly to learn as i was cutting my teeth learning many years ago.
Looks like a straight up kademlia (from the 160bit keys at least) implementation with some modern RPC on top? would definitely consider looking closer at it. ATM I have that bit squared away enough for the initial program (though I’ve been gutting the library a bit for it to be functional for the use cases I have planned). but it’ll definitely need some love at some point. just have a million other parts to build first before the optimization bits occur.
From what I’m understanding your looking to do something like combine an arr stack, jellyfin/plex, torrent client, and vpn into a single package utilizing cloud storage? That sounds pretty cool since media collections can get big. I’m not quite getting the monetization side of things, is it just for access to the cloud storage? And then how does advertising and content creators come into play? That sounds like your also trying to compete with YouTube. I know your trying to keep things vague so don’t feel like you gotta go into details but I’m I understanding your post mostly?
I am potentially interested but I won’t have stable internet access besides cellular for about a year. I know your shooting for end of July so if need people asap then I’m no good.
Good luck regardless I got into selfhosting about 4 years back, and getting all the different programs set up correctly was quite the learning curve. Doing it all in one style might simplify the process enough to onboard less tech savvy people.
I understanding your post mostly?
You’re 100% on point! Yes the monetization is mostly for access to the cloud storage, covers the supporting infrastructure, and ideally puts some food on my and a few others table long term so we can continue improving these system, while giving users cloud storage for orders of magnitude less than whats on the market.
I have a few other systems I’d like to invert and break the markets on as well. but these things take time to build sadly, both from a pure technical stand point and from a communal building process.
For example ATM I have no street cred so why would people trust what I say? That’s what I’m trying to do atm with this post: build that credibility with you and other people within the community via working together and building a useful tool, that does exactly what I’ve laid out here. I expect this process to take years. =)
And then how does advertising and content creators come into play?
The advertising stuff is longer term, and ideally just a way for users to earn some scratch. For me its a middle finger to the current systems out there.
But the basic idea is if the system hits a critical mass of users and is in that ‘valuable eye space’ category users will be able to enable and setup ads. The money from the ads will be credited to your account in two parts, yours and a portion towards the creators of the content you watch. Each month the creator portion will be applied on top of subscription value for the peoples whose content you’ve watched. Your portion you can do whatever you want; can be used to offset your subscription, take payouts at set values (processing fees blow).
The ads are the hardest part to do honestly, as it requires a user base and either a platform for advertisers to use or hooking into the existing (exploitative) systems somehow. Its an area that if / when its done will be done very thoughtfully.
but I won’t have stable internet access besides cellular for about a year.
That makes you super valuable in this context! unstable environments are the best test beds. I usually have my dev environments setup to simulate these situations, but doesnt replace the real thing.
Doing it all in one style might simplify the process enough to onboard less tech savvy people.
That’s my hope! I have a few non-techies lined up for later in the process. primarily once the VPN stuff is in place; at least at that point they’ll just need to focus on signing up for a VPN and finding a private tracker.
I am potentially interested
Great! I’m potentially interested in working with you! ;) We’ll be in touch.
