I don't understand the economics of this at all. Video distribution is bandwidth heavy. If you're running your own peer tube instance the server costs are surely going to outstrip any revenue you make from it. if users have to carry that load and seed your stuff they'll have to waste their own storage. What is the incentive for anyone to do this? Exacerbated by the fact that the entire thing mostly seems to attract people who get banned from anything else so the content isn't even going to attract advertisers.
That's the thing: It doesn't have to pay off and it doesn't have to generate revenue. That's not its goal. It is not a business model.
If we want good content und independence from YouTube, perhaps it is time to see, that it might cost us a tiny bit of money each month, to uphold our freedom. One rented server can easily support many users, each of those can chip in to finance renting the server. It can be done transparently, so that users always know what they are paying for and how much is covered already for the month. It is time to learn, that we need to support what we like financially, so that people can actually live from providing us with it. As long as we do not do so, people can only provide us with their creations by generating revenue in other ways.
> That's the thing: It doesn't have to pay off and it doesn't have to generate revenue. That's not its goal. It is not a business model.
This is the answer to so much of what's wrong with the modern web. We need less business and to get more communities back into the center of the web... it should be even easier today since IaaS is so much cheaper, I think it's just a focus problem, nothing is relevant to the big sites that act as the lens to the web unless it's directly pumping money somewhere.
A large amount of small creators do this today only because YouTube is a free service. A lot of people will use their free time to make videos, but not if a portion of their disposable income has to be dedicated to hosting them.
Peertube isn't based on the assumption that as a content creator you have to run your own instance (and pay for it), but rather that a community can pool together resources as part of a non-profit organization and host many content creators at once, without centralizing everything. For example: skeptikon.fr for french-speaking science/critical content, kolektiva.media for social struggle / anarchist content, etc...
So of course content creators can chip in, eg. if they accept donations, and especially if (not on the two instances listed above) they are paid to advertise content and products. But users can chip in, too. Overall, hosting costs are cheap because:
- they're mutualized between artists
- there's no tracking apparatus like Youtube hooked to a machine learning model to keep you addicted
- there's no advertisement to serve or complex upload filter to make sure your public domain recordings bring money to the copyright cartel [0]
- if a video becomes popular (eg. a cool livestream) a sufficient portion of people will seed it via WebTorrent (torrent + WebRTC + STUN), considerably reducing server load [1]
[1] I've heard faithful reports from fellow sysadmins that their small VPS handled load for hundreds of simultaneous viewers on livestream thanks to a few people seeding (by just "viewing" the video in their browser with default settings) from a home fiber connection
For most people, the time/money tradeoff isn't very flexible. Only few have the choice of working fewer hours for less money, while even fewer have the choice of working more hours for more money.
So much goodness out there exists in spite of this. Local model railroad clubs is one that comes to mind. I’d rather that than Walmart, which has mastered its cost model.
Yes. Time invested given for free at the expense of other endeavors. I’m not arguing against doing any of these things. Just simply stating that time = money. I’d rather spend my money/time on model railroad building too. z scale ftw.
> That's the thing: It doesn't have to pay off and it doesn't have to generate revenue. That's not its goal. It is not a business model.
From a purely-technical lens, that may not seem like a fatal flaw. When viewed through a whole-product lens, it is. PeerTube's anonymous, censor-proof nature is enough to attract a certain class of content that repels advertisers, but then what? Until the dark side of distributed technologies is addressed instead of touted as a feature, this doesn't have a chance of popular success.
Peertube is neither of those things. Publishing is pseudonymous, not anonymous: requires an account on the server you'd like to publish videos to, just like youtube and other video platforms. And it's only censorship-proof as much as it uses HTTPS/WebRTC to share content. I haven't seen any study of the Sybil-proofness of Webtorrent protocol, but Peertube certainly does not protect instance operator from DNS/IP censorship or from having their machines seized by law enforcement.
Peertube is based on a federated model (like email/www) where instances are "responsible" for the content/users they host, encouraging smaller, trusted communities. Search is currently being addressed via SepiaSearch (a dedicated search engine), and the joinpeertube.org/sepiasearch.org listings are seriously moderated (i once reported a white supremacist instance and it was delisted in under 24h).
Last time I checked the way that webtorrent/peertube queries for peers watching same video is centralised over websockets to a a select few webtorrent trackers, I think theirs only 2 or 3 running, meaning if you wanted to take down peertubes p2p functionality all you would have to hit would be their webtorrent trackers with a ddos and the platform would go down, I'm not 100% about sibil protections but I do know that peertubes webtorrent trackers verify the structure of an announce, and if it is in invalid format bans you from the tracker, compared to the other webtorrent trackers which are more happy to accept something less strict as an announce
> over websockets to a a select few webtorrent trackers, I think theirs only 2 or 3 running
Maybe you're talking about STUN servers? There's only 2 hardcoded STUN servers for the moment [0] indeed, but that's only for WebRTC discovery and will be easy to fix. It does not prevent server-side redundancy because every peertube instance runs its own tracker, from my understanding on the protocol (let me know if i've got that wrong), but taking those STUN servers down would indeed prevent p2p seeding, except for publicly-routable clients (not behind NAT).
I'm reasonably confident that the protocol I was working with was json over websocket https://openwebtorrent.com/ tracker
this was a few months ago now so peertube could be running something different
So each peertube instance runs its own openwebtorrent compatible tracker, which then has its own protocol inforced at the wire level, compared to when i looked at the other openwebtorrent implementations depending on the server didn't enforce the wire format and you could send json over the wire, the trackers seemed to just be a sort of pubsub system where announces would get resent to other connected clients under the same infohash or whatever they used
Wikipedia is widely mirrored, pseudonymous for writers, anonymous for readers (unlike YouTube!), possessed of internal policies against most kinds of censorship, and quite practically inconvenient to censor externally. Certainly you could do better on these axes, but Wikipedia is already getting an enormous amount of vital information to people despite other people wanting to suppress that information.
The censorship on Wikipedia is internal. Biased articles locked from public editing, delete hungry maintainers that gatekeep content away from the site. Sure some countries can block it, but the subtle internal censorship is far more damaging because it's easy for people to overlook/write off
Latest example I've seen is the article for Marjorie Taylor Greene. It's under "extended-confirmed-protection", listed as a "Good article". Yet starts right off with the summary, "Marjorie Greene,[3] is an American politician, businesswoman, and far-right[4] conspiracy theorist[5] serving as the U.S. representative for Georgia's 14th congressional district.[6]"
Those kind of abstract accusations do not belong in an encyclopedia article, and while there's a wealth of "citations" buried under the [5], none are anything other than news articles repeating the same accusation. It's baseless mudslinging that is the exact opposite of sticking to provable individual claims and facts, like a proper encyclopedia article should consist of.
Granted, it's not an insurmountable bar as it appears anyone with 500 edits can begin to participate. However, it shows a clear attempt to control the narrative to a specific one, and erecting barriers against changing that while officially endorsing the current one. It spans greater than just that, and seems common across other political articles on Wikipedia.
Hmm, by saying that the accusations are "baseless", you seem to be saying that she's not actually a conspiracy theorist. But it's not just repetitions of a flat accusation; for example, NPR quoted her as saying, "There's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take this global cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles out, and I think we have the president to do it." (Evidently she's also claimed that the Clintons had John F. Kennedy Jr. killed, that Hillary Clinton and Huma Abedin performed a human sacrifice in order to drink a child's blood, that the damage to the Pentagon 20 years ago was due to a missile rather than an airplane impact, and that the UN is committing genocide against white people.) Are you saying that NPR was lying in attributing that quote to her, or that she did say that but somehow is nevertheless not a conspiracy theorist? Or am I misinterpreting your claim of "baseless mudslinging"?
It seems to me that describing Marjorie Taylor Greene as a "far-right conspiracy theorist" is just as encyclopedic and verifiable as describing Charles Manson as "an American criminal who led the Manson Family" or Jeffrey Dahmer as "an American serial killer and sex offender who committed the murder and dismemberment of 17 men and boys". Why do you disagree?
Peertube is closer to MediaWiki than Wikipedia. Anyone can setup an instance, and scrap/share content from other instances using URLs. Nothing is distributed, anonymous or censorship-proof... but the entire network is federated and pseudonymous.
> From a purely-technical lens, that may not seem like a fatal flaw. When viewed through a whole-product lens, it is.
YouTube is an advertising business, Peertube is software. They are like day and night different.
Peertube is developed by a community of developers, governed by a french non-profit called Framasoft. Their primary mission is community governance, establishing a legal footprint, and promoting Peertube, in the same vain as Mozilla, the Drupal Foundation and many others.
According to the Peertube website, 90% of Framasoft's funding consists of donations. Since they don't sell a service, don't have to maintain infrastructure to enable hosting of videos, they don't require a complex organization and large investments.
Sharing the costs of a common good tends to work out on a small scale, and it's a valid alternative to private for-profit initiatives. Reeading tip: ERS's "The Cathedral and the Bazaar"
> PeerTube's anonymous, censor-proof nature is enough to attract a certain class of content that repels advertisers, but then what? Until the dark side of distributed technologies is addressed instead of touted as a feature, this doesn't have a chance of popular success.
Peertube isn't a single service that contains a "certain class of content that repels advertisers". It's software that allows anyone to set up their own server and hook it up in a federated network of servers.
It's a bit like online fora. Like, PHPbb and vBulletin are just sofware. Anyone can download a copy, install it on their own server, run their own forum and develop their own community. It used to be that there were fora about anything and everything ranging from gaming, knitting, books, history to the less savory topics and themes. Few would argue that these weren't successful in their heyday.
The biggest challenge federated networks face is this: discovery of content. That's what defines how much they will appeal to a large audience.
Centralized services like YouTube are popular because they've perfected the discovery of information relevant to their audience to a fine art. YouTube becoming an ad business is a paradox: they arrived at that point because that's the only viable business model to cover the cost of centralized hosting of billions of videos, and the bandwidth required to serve billions of viewers.
Federated networks don't suffer that problem because the costs of hosting content are shared across the nodes of the network. Peertube leverages WebTorrent as their file sharing protocol. The existence of individual nodes across the network is predicated by local economic conditions. Some nodes may disappear if they can't recoup their own operational costs. But distributed character of the network implies that its enduring success is predicated by the longevity of a majority of nodes.
One could also post chunks of videos to a channel on an existing (corporate) video platform in an obscured form, such that they survive transcoding, and reconstitute them in the client. For example, invert the Pr channel, and reverse audio frames (realistically, do something better). There's your free CDN, provided by a legacy video platform in a way which (at least conceivably, if one properly tailors his approach) does not violate their ToS.
How would they notice? I'm not suggesting to publish "random noise" videos, but maybe to make abstract art video/music that could "hide" the information?
>perhaps it is time to see, that it might cost us a tiny bit of money each month
that's still "generating revenue". maybe not profit, but servers and bandwidth cost non-trivial amounts of money and somebody has to pay for that. whether it's donations, or user-fees, or ads, or private benefactors, the revenue has to come from somewhere. but if a video service has no answer as to how it can sustain itself, it's questionable whether it's worth the effort of developing it or developing your audience on it.
So why not just make the video available on torrent?
It's even possible to streamline the experience for torrents like how Popcorntime has done. Users don't need to even be technical enough to understand what torrents are - the same way users don't need to understand tcp/ip to visit a website.
Bittorrent protocol is not supported in browsers. Peertube uses Webtorrent, which is a WebRTC port of the Bittorrent protocol. Those two networks are incompatible but the magnet hashes are the same and there is progress in desktop clients implementing Webtorrent peering.
You can try to think of Peertube as Popcorn Time with user following and channels and comments... and interop with the rest of the Fediverse.
Those are commercial alternatives, with curated content. So creators can get paid directly from the subscription income. Clearly it serves a somewhat different community than the fediverse. Personally, that seems okay. There should be room for both things to exist.
i absolutely love this answer, and we need more people who think like this. props to you friend. much love, and much support. lets spread awareness to these poisoned minds.
> How do we get good content from a platform that is explicitly copyleft?
The same way we get good software from a ´community´ which is explicitly copyleft.
> Will the vast majority of creators use this even as a backup?
The best way to use platforms like Peertube and Odysee is by using it as a primary source, with Youtube and Vimeo essentially playing the role of CDN. Should the censors not like your video for $reasons they can block them 'till they turn ultraviolet but they can not deny anyone access to them. Make sure to advertise your alternative distribution channel(s), use the same channel names and video titles so they can be found through regular web search and you're set [1].
[1] that it, until censorship reaches the network layer
I know. But people who cares about the server code care more about such things. I made a copyleft movie and the PeerTube site I put it on went down forever. YouTube and archive.org remain up
There are people who like running their own linux server with their own hardware. Occasionally those people are also interesting in creating videos or have friends/family that are.
There are also people who get funded through sites like patreon, who might not care too much for youtube advertisement or YT freemium. Sometimes you even see youtube personalities switching to twitch or other platforms just in order to escape youtube and do legal activity which is just close to impossible on youtube. There is an endless stream of youtube videos complaing about youtube copyright system and how it makes their job close to impossible in some cases. Game reviews and movie reviews are two areas almost dominated by the issue of false copyright claims, which has forced some creators to abandon the platform as a revenue sources.
There is even float plane which was designed from the ground to solve the youtube problem, created by a company that fully relied on youtube for its existence. If your company existence is depended on a free service provided by someone else, you might want to reconsider how safe you should feel. PeerTube might serve a similar purpose.
On top of that we have scientists who might want to know that their research isn't taken down because of false copyright claims or fleeting politics. A company that has linked instruction videos in their books/teaching material might want to be sure that links still work 10 years from now. Activists might want to avoid the risk that their documentation doesn't go dark from a political requests or false claim. Police brutality victims might want to be sure that the copyrighted music playing in the background, placed there intentionally to get copyright claims, does not stop them from uploading videos.
What is the incentive for anyone to run a Tor/i2p/IPFS/Torrent seed node?
This is difficult for normies to understand, but money isn't the only thing that incentivizes people to do things. There are many people for whom "Fuck YouTube" is the only incentive required to participate.
The fact is most videos are unpopular, so they don't have a very high bandwidth requirement. Those that do have a high bandwidth requirement are the popular videos that will be seeded by more nodes in the network. Typically this popularity is brief, so as the popularity fades, nodes can switch to hosting other content without a dramatic uptick in bandwidth usage for other nodes. The system works as long as users typically seed approximately the same amount as they leech.
Perhaps efficiency shouldn't be the thing we optimize for in this case. If you look at the internet it's extremely inefficient, there are millions of DNS servers all kind of have semi recent information about domains. There are millions of websites mainly hosted on extremely inefficient servers. There are millions of images and other assets mainly compressed less than they should be wasting tons of bandwidth. Yet here we are, the internet works and it works great. It'd be a sad day if someone argued that we should abandon all this and give the keys to someone like Google? Because it'd be more efficient? Screw that!
The thing is that dns and static web servers are serving an absolutely minuscule amount of data while a single video on youtube is several GB in the higher qualities. No one can compete on video hosting because it is constantly at the upper limit of what is possible. It will be forever before all videos go 4k and when they do, there will be a push to have it all at 60fps and then at higher bitrates and then at 120fps.
Diminishing returns. I think most people would agree that 1Mbps 1080p AV1 looks ok (https://demo.bitmovin.com/public/firefox/av1/ -- use the quality selector and wait a while) and the vast majority of "content" doesn't warrant cinema quality anyway.
There's always some push for more quality but that doesn't mean the audience requires it. Youtube itself had horrible quality and outdated codecs for a long long time yet and that didn't stop it from getting popular. Video snobs are a bit of a niche that youtube has historically not catered for.
As far as I know, youtube has always been pretty close to the top for free video streaming quality. Sites like facebook and such compress the video far more than youtube ever has.
So yeah they were not the best video possible to create but they were the best for the internet at the time and still are. You can upload 8k HDR 60fps videos which are sized at multiple GB right now.
Once youtube has it, people are not going to tolerate 720p video from an alternative.
Hobby? Not everybody does anything for making money.
For exmaple Wikipedia, thausands of people write articles, for free, they got no money.
Huge amount of open source developers publishing their work for everybody, free.
A significant portion of content creators do it as a full time job. Ads is a stable revenue stream for these content creators. You as a consumer are free to move to any decentralized video platform you like, but the main bottleneck for any significant shift in market share depends on content creators, and ultimately, on advertisers.
> Ads is a stable revenue stream for these content creators.
Ads are a revenue stream mostly for the platform e.g. YouTube itself. You can have a look at this[1] or any other "how my YouTube channel makes money" video to see that's the case.
In-video ads, on the other hand, are indeed a significant revenue stream for creators, but those have nothing to do with the platform and everything to do with the single creator.
According to the video you linked, AdSense and in-video ads are basically tied for income (26 and 27% respectively). Both of those are significant sources of income!
In the video I linked, "Sponsored projects" is a type of in-video ads, where they build a particular PC and the video is sponsored by a hardware company, so the total for all types of in-video ads is 41% vs 26% from AdSense.
For smaller Youtubers (LTT is a very large channel) the gap between AdSense and in-video tends to be wider. I don't have hard data on this but it's the result of talking to several youtubers in person. If someone has the data, it would be cool to share it here.
How much would I have to pay to replace the revenue that a content creater would get from my eyeball traffic on YouTube? From what I'm reading it's less than a penny per video. I send about $30/mo to Patreon, that's enough for what, 3000 videos? I watch YouTube way too much, but I don't watch it that much.
Realistically I should be aiming to replace Google's revenue for my eyeball traffic, because that covers all of the costs as well. Still seems very doable.
It would be nice if Patreon partnered up with them and handled the transactions.
Realistically, every PeerTube viewer would also need to pay for the thousands or more viewers any creator will lose by forcing viewers to pay money and by moving to a niche platform with worse UX and no serious discovery.
That really puts it into perspective. If we each chipped in one penny per video we could replace advertisements for everyone. At least in terms of supporting the content creators.
How many videos do you watch per day? If you're anything like me, i at least skim through 100 videos a day. Likely more, depending on my free time and interest.
That's like 1-2 dollars worth of 'penny' donations per day. I'm not sure i would be willing to pay that, esp. if for videos that i'm only mildly interested in, and would not have gone to watch if it weren't free.
it's not like the OG creators expected money from it. They did it as a part time hobby to show friends. They didn't expect to transform their lives. I get just as much enjoyment watching creators who only spend a few hours per week on their content as a hobby as those who have turned it into a giant company with employees and a studio. Actually, I get less enjoyment from those who have overly commercialized their channel.
Why does money have to touch everything? Why do I continue to make comments on HN? It's certainly not because I hope to monitize this. It's fun and you share your ideas.
Acting like removing the ability for creators to get money from ads is going to eliminate all creators is silly, so yes it's a hard sell for existing creators, and if forced upon it'll remove a lot of the profit driven creators, and I view that as a good thing.
Some of the best content on Youtube takes time and money to make - even for hobbyists and enthusiasts, and much of it would be impossible if creators were also forced to hold a second full-time job to cover their budget. I say "second" because content creation is a job whether it's compensated for or not. And not everyone who makes a living at it has a giant company with employees at a studio.
Yes it's true that not everybody who makes a living from it has multiple employees and a studio, PewDiePie is a good example of somebody who didn't ruin his channel by transforming the nature of it once he got more views.
Sure, content creation is a job whether they're compensated or not. I'm not saying that we deserve free content, I'm saying that there will always be people bored enough to create content they want to share.
Image macros are created daily but nobody is creating them with the expectation of compensation. (There are social media accounts who compile them so they can gain followers / post ads, but the original creators aren't)
People write blogs knowing they get 20 views per month. That's the voices I want to hear. Not from someone who reads a book about how to get $5k in passive income per month by churning blog posts and growing a mailing list!
The number #1 post on the front page about blogs has this comment
"As a minor counterpoint: I've come to dread blogs and newsletters because so many of them are written by grind culture freaks who only write faux-insightful SEO'd content as a way to build an audience to sell snake oil to."
Just replace blogs and newsletter with YouTube channels and that's my sentiment.
Not a youtuber, but I had a successful art/webcomic-related patreon once before deleting it precisely because of ideological reasons. (Or as I prefer to call them, ethics.)
I would much rather the old internet come back where "content creator" was never a word that existed, or could exist.
There is a reason why these Youtube channels don't just roll their own platform: their content is not worth money. Same reason why no one pays for your blog. It is just not worth any amount of money.
There are many Youtubers whose content I like, but if I had to pay monthly fee (or pay per view) for their videos I wouldn't watch them. I think this was pretty much confirmed with the Youtube Red experiment. Many of the channels I follow got picked up for the program, but I have no desire to pay for the shows they produced for Youtube.
And how the ads work on Youtube makes it completely unwatchable without AdBlocking and I am not paying for the Youtube Premium to remove ads because A) it won't remove the ads and sponsorships that are embedded in the videos and B) I don't want to give Youtube as a platform any cut.
I feel like you completely validate my point that people aren't willing to pay for content, the original sin making alternative monetization a requirement.
You're willing to watch the content, just not pay for it.
This is why concepts like PeerTube will never attract the majority of content, because it isn't free to make it, it isn't free to show it, it's only free to consume it.
It isn't poor quality stuff. Just because you don't like the content that Youtube creators make doesn't make it poor quality
Ironically, when I go to Peertube, all the content there is objectively low quality with extremely poor production value, little to no editing, and clearly done with the lowest of budgets.
The content airing on Youtube from the top ~1000+ creators is easily as good or better than the majority of cable TV.
It's often extremely high quality content, frankly.
Production quality with fancy cameras and editing doesn't make the content good. It makes it fancy.
And yes there are some Youtubers whose I have subscribed to and their content is often great. However it is not consistently great enough to pay for it just like cable TV. And that is just the top 1% of the top 1%. Rest is at best mediocre and often just grabage.
Again, that's your personal opinion which clearly deviates from the public opinion. It's okay to not like it, but to call it bad because you dislike it is ridiculous.
We're talking about business models here, we're talking about a whole industry, and you should realize that your opinion is worse than useless, it's actively harming your ability to understand and predict
If PeerTube wants to be a 0.00001% write off for radical CopyLeftists and "Hackers" to put up some low effort, low value, "good" content then so be it but to even bring up Youtube in a conversation of yet-another-tiny-site is silly, because that concept is not competing with Youtube and could never compete with Youtube.
So my opinion doens't matter and is worse than useless, but your opinion on PeerTube's content is worth while? If my opinion deviates so much from the public's opinion why isn't Youtube pay per view? Or at least monthly subscription? Sadly most people are not tech savy enough to use ad blockers or are consuming Youtube with their mobile devices where they can't block ads.
As for PeerTube I don't care. Sadly video is currently expensive to host and only Google has the pockets to operate a site like Youtube. I won't pay for it and the day my adblocker stops working is the day I stop watching it.
I mean, radio and TV were free OTA for decades. I don't know what you want to call the "start" of content, but ad-supported free models have been around for a very long time.
PeerTube addresses this specific problem by employing WebTorrent so that when many people are watching a video at the same time they download from each other instead of everyone using up the server's available bandwidth.
because people want to download illegal movies and porn, or host linux isos as a service for the commons. There's practically no commercial activity around torrents because it's an incredibly inefficient way to serve large amounts of data.
You may not be aware of this, but like everything on PeerTube, the video we are commenting on here is in fact served up via BitTorrent. I got about a third of it from the diode.zone seed, which, if I understand correctly, is paid for out of Micah Scott's Patreon.
The inefficiency of torrents on near-symmetric internet connections is pretty minor. If a 1GiB movie is on Netflix, each user has to download 1GiB of data over your internet connection. If it's in a torrent, each user has to download 1GiB of data and also upload 1GiB of data. The efficiency difference is only a factor of 2. And the 1GiB of upload bandwidth was, in many cases, idle anyway.
(Well, there's also the fact that the users are paying the cost of distributing the movie, rather than Netflix paying part of it. So you'd think that information that benefits the people who receive it, like Linux, porn, and sewing and soapmaking tutorials, rather than the people who produce it, like advertising, would tend to be distributed by torrents. But, for a commercial setup, this is a minor consideration; even ordinary hosted servers pay relatively little for bandwidth, and Netflix probably pays nothing in most cases. I suspect Micah Scott ended up paying about 10% of the cost of me watching this video, not counting the value of my time.)
Legal or not, the fact that many people host and share dozens of large torrents from their home servers for free belies the claim that sharing video would necessarily be too expensive to be practical or would devolve back to turn off the century RealVideo quality.
because decentralized systems need to redundantly store data, a lot. Youtube accounts for, depending on the source 15% of global internet traffic.
The reason you can watch videos at 1080p wherever you are in the world buffer free is because the system is ridiculously optimized, cached locally, and so on. Do you want to go back to 180p because one of the two guys hosting that five year old video with 50k views you liked just went offline?
Which isn't too expensive if you have paying customers. Doesn't make people angry when they are on data cap or trying to do something else on their network. Also doesn't have to deal with endless NAT and middlebox issues.
But often ISPs will willingly host the content for free since it saves them money as well. Steam and netflix have caches inside ISP datacenters.
> What is the incentive for anyone to [seed content]?
The incentive is to make content you like accessible to more people. Of course you can do it in your "garage" if you have huge hard drives and good connectivity, but you can also do it as a collective by setting up your own instance and mirroring other instances aligned with your values/interests.
There is exactly zero incentive for an instance to mirror public instances where people can upload terabytes of trash content. But there is strong incentives to replicate well-moderated instances with quality content, because the cost of that is very low (you can rent a VPS with 2TB HDD for ~20€/mo these days).
> Exacerbated by the fact that the entire thing mostly seems to attract people who get banned from anything else
I don't think that's the case. For now i've mostly seen established non-profits (eg. libre software/culture NGOs and workers cooperatives) who were disenchantized with Youtube. I've seen exactly one white supremacist instance, and it got delisted from "official" instances list in under 24h.
My immediate thought is that it could offer an alternative tier of support to subscriptions / patreon - i.e. people who supply a specific amount of storage / bandwidth can be considered a premium tier "fan" and get perks... exclusive gifts, services, cough content cough, moderation rights, etc.
This could be an avenue for tech savvy sex workers who need an alternative to OnlyFans.
If distribution is done like bit torrent then the users pay for it - the cost is then distributed and very low.
There needs to be some kind of peer to peer rating system so you can find content suited to you (reinforce your bubble I suppose) because there is going to be no central filtering authority, but that's part of the point.
