Newgrounds is considering adding activitypub support but is concerned about hosting fees for serving images to millions of people

morrowind@lemmy.ml to Fediverse@lemmy.world – 143 points –
༺NIX༻ (@nix@merveilles.town)
merveilles.town
63

TIL the flash animation I made in 2004 is still available on Newgrounds.

https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/201157

I'm pretty sure you're the most famous person to use Lemmy. Well besides Margot Robbie

Newgrounds is dead serious about preserving its content, even with the death of Flash. Ruffle, the Flash emulator, was created by a former employee and Newgrounds is a major sponsor of the project. The most important movies have been converted to video as well.

When Newgrounds adopted high-resolution thumbnails about a decade and a half ago, there was a big volunteer campaign to recreate thumbnails for the entire back catalogue of the portal.

Thanks to Ruffle, people can and are still submitting Flash content to the portal, in addition to web-friendly content!

Omg mine too (too embarrassing to share).

I forgot how much more patient with pacing we all used to be back in the 00s. Just trusting that the video would go somewhere and there'd be a payoff.

Looking at some of the popular videos from back then, people these days would just scroll away because nothing hooked their attention quickly enough. Myself included. We've been trained to expect such quick payoff 😭.

Fuck, now I'ma have to go check on my old deviantart account.

Oh my god. I can't get the song out of my head now! Sweet Jesus what have you done to me?!

Newgrounds would be awesome in the Fediverse tbh, would bring so much content (beyond politics and news).

Image hosting seems to be super problematic with activity pub, especially with something pf Newgrounds' size. I'm super invested in this, can't wait to see where it'll go.

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TIL Newgrounds still exists.

Not only does it still exist, newgrounds is unique in that it is a long-running website from the early days that is still being run by the same person (never bought out or sold), still has no ads (despite funding issues), still has the same basic focus, still hosting the same content, and is still more or less exactly the same despite some UI changes.

Granted part of that is there hasn't been any real pressure on it, but still.

Genuinely, it is the kind of thing that I would want to put behind glass, because it is an abnormality in this wasteland we call the internet. It's this beautiful little corner that has been allowed to remain as it is, unmolested by the terrible bullshit around it.

It's feels like it's the only site where the algorithm doesn't kill animators.

Not to mention that fediverse software still loves to occasionally hug of death a server when you post links, heh.

(Post federates to lots of servers, and lots of servers pull images/previews all at more or less once.)

Quick, someone post "Cascade" from Homestuck and bring down the entire fediverse.

I’d donate a few dollars a month. Newgrounds is a great content creation space. I still play games there from time to time. The Mario 63 game is off the wall. Dead Estate is also a fantastic retro style shooter like the ones I remember from my childhood. I think places like this need to survive.

So we need better federated hosting...

I'd love to be able to "seed" the fediverse through p2p hosting of some sort. I'd set aside 1 TB of storage and 20 MB/s for that.

Yeah I've thought a tiny bit about this but it gets dodgy with things like csam.

How do we address some one uploading stuff that would get you arrested?

I would hav thought stuff like Lemmy would have configurations to eg.: not allow to upload images locally, only hotlink.

Anyway, an alternative is "zero knowledge" storage, where you don't know what you are storing (hence, you can't "choose" what to host or not host either). Another alternative is disjoint storage, where two different servers store different halves of a file (eg.: an Odd Bytes server and an Even Bytes server), but this means now it's necessary to hit more servers to recover a file.

But the sensible thing to do IMO is to apply "common carrier" concept. The water distribution company is not, to my knowledge, held liable when something happens like you fill a bucket of water and share it with someone else.

The water distribution company is not, to my knowledge, held liable when something happens like you fill a bucket of water and share it with someone else.

No but they are liable if there is lead in the water, even if they don't know it.

There's gotta be some kind of limited liability for this kind of thing. I mean, banks wouldn't be liable if someone put csam in a safe deposit box or (assuming they don't x-ray packages) UPS shipping csam in a sealed package. I think there just needs to be reasonable safeguards against it but I don't know if any of that is built into the software.

Issue here is that what’s in a safe deposit box isn’t also being shared/distributed. It is locked away.

If, however, they made copies of the contents of a box and put it in other boxes … and it came out somebody used that for CSAM then there probably would be some kind of liability.

Besides CSAM there’s also copyrighted material, etc which section 230 kind of covers but even then gets tricky since there’s a duty to respond to DMCA takedowns in order to get safe harbor protections.

It'd be a little more like someone going to a Kinko's (or whatever like that exists anymore) and using their copiers to copy CSAM.

Unfortunately we are at a point where Cisco Cloudflare and Google are held liable for filesharing-related domains their DNS relays are resolving IPs for...

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Maybe nobody keeps a complete file? That way no one machine can keep a complete copy of anything let alone access it if it was stored in a single chunk of storage cryptographically? There’s already so much risk for hosts here not sure there’s a way to be safer without invasive technologies.

Probably arrange it such that not one person/server knows what the stored bytes are. There can be a server where the bytes/blocks get reconstructed where one can check for the bad stuff.

That doesn't solve the cost problem. Now all the traffic is going through that intermediate server, and someone has to pay for that.

The had moved on to legal liability for csam, not hosting costs

Still, hosting costs were the reason for discussing legal liability. Such a server also increases centralization which isn't ideal.

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but is concerned about hosting fees for serving images to millions of people

People stopped caring about image bandwidth decades ago. Try wrangling a video-hosting problem, like PeerTube does.

so like not share the videos peertube style? just the art section of the site?

Hell Yeah, Newgrounds is blocked in my country. But if they added Activity Pub it will solve the problem for me.

It would just federate comments I think, you'd still need to go to the site for the media

Can't they just not allow anyone on their server? Like read-only while people talk about it from other servers?

Reading still requires distributing media

Omg that would be peak 🥹

Edit: autocorrect :/

hasnt this already been solved with cdns? even if you just use it for the image hosting.

Those cost money too

shit costs money. cant imagine wanting to stand up a server/instance/whatevs with no hosting costs.

Not no hosting cost, but cost for things you don't want or need. I would host a server if it only filled up with things on my direct server and not pulling images and posts from other servers