The protocol isn’t the hard part. It’s the monetizing that is. Creators aren’t looking to provide content for free, especially if they are also now paying for hosting costs.
Ad spots (like Google does) work well because they can inject an up to date ad into an old video. In something like the fedeverse today a creators only option would be ads baked into the video, but they would only get paid for that up front which isn’t ideal…
I fail to follow how a competitor can pop up if the main users it’s attracting are ones that don’t want to view ads or pay for subscriptions.
I thought I listed a bunch of cases where there were options (and not monopolies). But yes, 100% inside many ecosystems are monopolies, and those ecosystems/walled gardens have been slowly expanding every chance these companies have.
I’m saying the competition can only exist because products that actually fill the same need.
If you decide that you need product A, and have multiple options on where to get that, you have competition.
So if you’re looking for a Cola, you have options.
If you’re looking to play StardewValley, you have options where you want to buy it and which platform you want to play it on, you don’t need to buy a new game system to play it.
If you’re looking to play the latest Zelda game, you don’t have options, you need to buy a Switch.
If you’re looking to watch Ozarks, you don’t have options, you can only watch Netflix.
If you’re looking to just have something playing on TV and don’t really care what it is, you have options.
If you’re looking to listen to music, you have options, most of the steaming services have most of the music.
If you’re looking to be able to text friends, you have options, any phone will work.
If you’re looking to be able to iMessage friends and for your case only iMessage will work, iPhone is your only option.
Competition is complex and is more dependent on a consumer needs than just classification of what a product is. In your earlier point you used Apple as an example of a company that can increase prices despite competition, but really Apple is a prime example of a company putting up walls to an ecosystem making it really hard to leave once you’re in.
Generally in the current tech landscape there barely is any competition outside openish platforms. But with tech, you often can’t look at competition as product A vs Product B. Like while we can say that Window competes with OSx, it’s harder to say that a Mac laptop competes with a given Dell laptop (because what you can do with each OS is different to different people).
This is why I like to think of all the tv streaming services as different types of food stores. There is no supermarket that supplies everything, you’re forced to have memberships to the single butcher, the single milk man, the single bakery, etc. if you want a particular food, there is currently no (or very little) competition. You can certainly survive on just bread, and people are happy to do that, but that bakery can and will increase prices whenever because they aren’t really competing with the butcher.
I still think you’re looking at competition slightly wrong.
Coke and Pepsi do compete with eachother, along with the rest of the drink market. And overall prices in that industry are pretty low, some people will buy other competitors (the store brand Cola’s). But overall competition is working.
Apple only kinda competes. Sure a phone is a phone and a laptop is a laptop. But unless someone is entering the market for the first time. They already have applications they are looking to use, so if you need an iPhone, you need an iPhone, and same for a Mac. But if you’re an android or Windows user, suddenly you have a lot more choice because there is lots of competition!
The reason companies setup walled gardens, or pay for exclusive access to a piece of media is to erode competition. If a user wants that thing, they can only get it from that one place.
It’s only competition if they provide similar products.
The current landscape is like farmers markets and butchers. Sure they both provide food, but they don’t really directly compete with eachother.
Of course, percentage just help show relativity. It’s why people can look at a 0.5% increase and dismiss it as not significant.
Would it help if I translated the percentage for you? Linux surged 600000 to 2.3 million.
I’m super confused by your point.
In this case we’re looking at Steam.
I have no clue how many people submit to the steam survey, but I’ll assume it’s representative.
A quick google suggests steam has about 120 million active users.
Linux went from about 1.4% to 1.9%.
Rough math says Linux went from 1.7 million to about 2.3 million.
Or an increase of 600 000.
That a lot, both in relative terms and in real terms.
Here’s a counter example for you.
You own stock in banana company. Over one day the price increases 2x. All the news agency’s are talking about how banana surged in price today. Will you then suggest that banana didn’t surge in price because it only makes up 1% of the overall stock market?
That’s why we’re talking about relative percentages.
In your example we would need to know how many trees existed on your road/city before. If there were less than 3 or 4 trees in your city before this, saying there was a surge is likely fine.
What percentage increase do you feel is required for surge to be a reasonable definition. A 35% increase feels surge-y me.
This was my experience too. Ubuntu asks if I want to install the docker snap, I say sure. I then try to use docker and it’s completely unable to do what I need. I then need to figure out how to uninstall the snap and then install docker normally.
I tried a few snaps, but everytime they were a pain in the ass and I regretted it. Now I avoid them at all costs
When it comes to a fileserver, I still prefer Truenas.
I’ve freenas/Truenas for 10 or so years now and unraid for about 5. For the last year I’ve been working on migrating everything back to Truenas (scale in my case)
Some of my pain points with unraid:
Some pros:
Application/service hosting is still great in unraid. It’s still a pain in the ass getting a VM running on Truenas scale, but with Truenas Scale you can run docker directly.
being able to just add single disks at a time in unraid is nice (until you need to replace one…)
Anyway that’s my off the top of my head reasoning. Truenas is a little more work to use overall, but I’ve found it much more stable
Sponsors pay more upfront. If creators are only using sponsors than their whole back catalogue is basically valueless. If it costs a creator 2-10 cents a month to host a video (based off S3 pricing), but they only made 1000$ on it upfront when the video was made, overtime the back catalogue becomes a pretty significant financial burden if it’s not being monetized
Also it’s worth keeping in mind that many people are also using tools to autoskip sponsor spots, and the only leverage creators have for being paid by sponsors are viewership numbers.
Patreon is irrelevant, that’s just like Nebula, floatplane etc, it’s essentially a subscription based alternative to YouTube.
Discoverability is pointless if the people discovering you aren’t going to financial contribute. It’s the age old “why don’t you work for me for free, the exposure I provide will make it worth your time”, that hasn’t been true before and likely isn’t here. Creators aren’t looking to work for free (at least not the ones creating the high quality content we’re used to today)