Help Dtube Help You - d00k13 Digest Vlog #44 [ IPFS Nodes ]

What up Steemians! How can you help @Dtube help you? Simple install your own node, we all know that file sharing and streaming services are pretty bandwidth intensive and we all have those times when our files are not playable and something as simple as hosting our own files could very well make the difference for the entire system we all are working under. Hosting your own files will directly relate to the playability immediately after uploading, solving the infinite buffering problem that can only otherwise be fixed by leaving your browser open to keep your file in the IPFS cache. The @cypherpunks run a few IPFS nodes of their own, and by "pinning" our videos in their nodes our videos are both playable immediately and also playable indefinitely if you were not already aware eventually your videos on Dtube will be flushes to free up space when there is no longer a demand for that video.

I am not the expert on this subject but if you come to our community discord server #OneLoveDtube our @cypherpunks would be more than happy to walk you through the process of installing your own IPFS node on Windows or Linux so that you may host your own files. You could go one step further and help host files from the creators you love, all of which can be discussed in their own channel #dtube-skynet which you may ask for privilege to access.

@cypherpunks

@kingfredrickvi

Created an automated pinning script to make hosting files from your favorite authors much more simplified

Below Credit @toddmck

THE GOAL

The purpose of this thing, as I understand it, is to improve playability for our videos.
There are two distinct areas which need improvement
a. Immediately after upload, when all of the promo links hit and the upvote trails are doing their work and people want to discuss a video, they are often unplayable.
b. After some period of time, which completely depends on the popularity of the video but is likely around a week, all copies of the file will be booted from the DTube servers to save space. At that point, it is likely lost forever unless the creator has the original.

THE TECH

IPFS has some "beta quality" defects which compound the issues (or I just don't understand it well enough yet)
Decentralization is an important, perhaps primary objective. It's also hard.
a. There was an uploader that the DTube team built. The source is in github. This could be promising, since it would use people's spare capacity to help the network. Kind of like a bittorrent client.
b. There are some browser technologies, most notably the dat:// protocol and the Beaker browser which could point the way to a better future. Getting people to adopt a new browser might be a challenge, but it is very cool and promising technology and there are hints that the DTube team is thinking in that direction. There is also a "DAT p2p" browser plugin for mainstream browsers, which unfortunately requires running a separate local service/daemon to work.
c. There is an IPFS companion plugin for mainstream browsers which has dual modes. Can work with or without a separate service/daemon. Probably has limited storage in the browser only mode AND it eats a ton of CPU so that your local machine is nearly unusable while it's running.
Those were the "simple, just click here" solutions. More advanced:
a. People with local machines with spare capacity can host IPFS nodes directly on their machine(s). One of the main advantages of this is cheap storage, assuming an easily expandable desktop pc.
b. People with existing web hosting arrangements, especially VPS solutions, can use spare capacity to run IPFS nodes in a datacenter of some sort.
Since some centralization is inevitable, and people won't necessarily be able to use any of the options above, a hosting service would be a good thing to create.
a. There already is one, in the form of Nannal's 4.4cents/GB/MO IPFS Store https://ipfsstore.it/ which accepts STEEM payment.
b. There has been some fairly well thought out discussion in the skynet group of creating a value added service at a similar price point, which could also potentially make the uploading process simpler for the average user.
There is an auto-pinning application/script which has been developed by the utopian-io project and which allows us to pull 480p (or source if it's the only resolution) either by tag or by author.
- The "script" is intended to run in a Docker container.
- The "script" seems to be a fairly straightforward node.js application, so it should be runnable without too much fuss on Windows.

THE BUSINESS END

Most everyone in skynet so far is running some variant of the stuff in #3, above. Depending on available storage, some run the autopin script/app. Personally, I'm running both a VPS which I already had, and a local node on a PC at the house.

Graylan and KingFredrick are the primary drivers of #4, in terms of planning and capability. They already have a lot of compute resources at their disposal in various datacenters, and have done this kind of thing in the past.

I have personally been mostly interested in figuring out how to enable the stuff in #2, above, since it seems the preferrable long-term sustainable lowest cost route. Something more like bittorrent than YouTube would be the vision for that.

As a practical matter, there is a quicker route to success with a more centralized service.

Filecoin should/would be a good answer (at least partially) to some of the business end of this stuff, but there is no "there" there yet.