Yeah, that was the Content Nation debacle: https://wedistribute.org/2024/03/contentnation-mastodons-toxicity/
What's really sad is that the CN dev is actually a super nice and thoughtful dude. In his jurisdiction (Germany) he could've gone to prison after being caught with said materials.
Same thing initially happened with BridgyFed: https://wedistribute.org/2024/02/tear-down-walls-not-bridges/
I run Spectra Video at https://spectra.video. We have gated signups: basically, someone fills out a request form, we review it, the account gets approved within a short turnaround time, and the user's channel gets created.
There is a PeerTube plugin for premium subscriptions that does exactly this: https://github.com/kontrollanten/peertube-plugin-premium-users
Yeah, I'd say it might have more to do with the fact that making texts posts is a lot easier than making videos. It's still possible to introduce too much noise, regardless of medium, but there's a lot less friction when the medium is simpler and doesn't require much work.
It would be nice if there was an easy and straightforward way for instances to create their own shared indexes. There's a feature for this in PeerTube, which I guess is supposed to act like instance following + a shared search catalogue. It would be handy to know how to easily make sort of the federation equivalent of a webring.
The devs are also working on a mobile app, which I think is something the platform is sorely missing.
I actually wrote a bit about this in the past: https://deadsuperhero.com/2021/10/peertubes-content-wasteland/
TL;DR - Yeah, it's possible to fill up your local catalogue of remote entries really quickly through instance following. The problem is not a shortage of instances or videos, the problem is that cutting it down to the good stuff requires a lot of active curation. It's very easy to just open the firehose and drown in a never-ending stream of junk.
To be fair, the flagship instance recently had a surge of 200,000 new sign-ups. Dansup mentioned to me that he's currently seeing like 50 new posts every minute. He's probably scrambling to upgrade infra.
I agree, but there's still plenty of time for that to happen. I wish them all the success in the world.
I can confirm that the email is only for sending out an invite, for downloading the beta version. You just use your existing MastoAPI-enabled Fediverse account.
Good to know. I have an inkling that this probably slipped under the radar when the SurfApp team were looking at branding and trademarks. Despite the fact that Suckless projects tend to have a somewhat popular following in the *nix community, it's probably pretty obscure anywhere else.
You might want to check out Bandwagon. It's ActivityPub-based, and you can use it to submit your music to The Indie Beat Radio: https://bandwagon.fm/