In 2006 the majority of transfer traffic was from peer-to-peer software. Hosted by old laptops in people's garages, the peer to peer system can push forward even higher reliability than Google itself can achieve with centralization. Today a select handful of people control most of the Internet's data, and that is a problem. The internet is still a very new thing, many users online today do not remember the older protocols like Torrents, as well as their more centralized cousins (that are now shut down) like Napster, Limewire, and Kazaa.
What went wrong with user hosted content? When cash earnings became a spotlight for federal attention during the incubation phase of peer-to-peer / decentralized technology, creators/artists like Metallica used their massive influence to push politicians and even US government agencies like ICE to crush all innovation in the p2p sector. You can find many examples by searching around Torrentfreak or through archival data like textfiles.com .
With DTube, multiple and redundant methods exist enabling censor resistant uploading. This is because the software is freely released. Meaning anyone can set it up and upload their own videos without any 3rd party in between them and the network. With DLive, if their singular centralized website gets blocked, that's it. No more DLive. If DLive doesn't like your content and bans you, that's it, no more DLive. This is where DLive and DTube are completely different. DTube cannot ban users.
Many people viewed YouTube as just some website kids like for the silly cat videos. They didn't realize google would buy it up and make it into the staple it is today. Many are wondering in this age of social media warfare, What services/technology treats its users with respect? I believe in using Free software because we all can know ( as a collective ) what's going on in the backend. DLive and YouTube are black boxes. Imagine that you just signed up for another website, who doesn't care about you , only money, and who will use their algorithm to manipulate you (or at least they can do so) just like YouTube already does. What is the point?
Decentralized services cost the maintainers less to host than their centralized counterparts, and in many cases, nothing at all. If properly built and promoted, the users understand the benefit of hosting their own videos inside the Blockchain. Just like Bitcoin users understand why hosting many full stack copies of the Blockchain reduces the chances for manipulation or censorship. Decentralized technologies like Bitcoin and Steem, for the first time enable censor resistant content and a fair/transparent way for creators to earn money.
For this reason, I would love to see PewDiePie invest in people who release their code as free software. As the code is open, it is freely audited by anyone who would like to, even PewDiePie (or his community) can give back to the code and push it in the direction they would like to see. Thousands of people share a dream that decentralized services can improve social media interactions. Many incredibly hard challenges are still to come and the odds are against us. I feel the benefits are so great, when successful, it's worth a shot.
For years I didn't understand the real danger to having used closed and centralized social media and maybe I let it get to me more than it should have. This is why I believe in using Free Software Social Media (FSSM) as a base for what I would like to see the next generation of social media use.
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