Hi there! This is a video that I made that I’m hoping can act as a beginner friendly entry level point to the world of self hosting and running a homelab. Just thought I’d share in case anyone is interested, and I hope it can be a resource to share with noobies. I don’t claim to be an expert at all so I’d also love some feedback. Thanks!
I want a future where communities self host their media and circumvent media companies like Netflix and Disney. Local film clubs, TV clubs, hobbyists, etc. can come together and host as a collective bringing down costs and making this more accessible.
Like ham radio ppl
Who’s making the media?
Okay, so you don’t even need a socialist system for this, just a moderately sane government. Even here in Estonia, the government hands out funding for cultural projects. Now this is still a capitalist society, so you likely can’t get full funding for a big project.
In an actual socialist economy, the government will give you full funding for projects. The actors and everyone else working on a movie or TV show have guaranteed income that’s enough to live their lives, guaranteed living accommodations, etc, so they’re more likely to do it as a passion project, but they could still be paid as extra motivation. Funding is still required for equipment, etc. Unless you go fully money free as a society, in which case you ask the government to assign equipment to you.
Sometimes it’s hard to imagine a reality outside our own.
imagine it for us then. what would this model look like and be sustainable?
Sure.
The premise is to bring down costs, and not be free. This is a reality where we can share media we buy, because we own them again.
So you can kind of imagine the world 20-30 years back with VHS and DVDs. Just in the digital world.
Fewer people would buy the content, and less shareholders will be rich. Actors will also not go for multi million dollar salaries. But actors would still exist.
You can argue that this will bring down the number of movies, but most likely there will just be alot of small studios making movies instead of Netflix and Disney controlling the market from start to end.
There will be a much larger varaity in movies, and not that many reboots of past succes from the VHS/DVD age.
Outside of the “stars” and directors, people working in the film/tv industry already have a fairly low income (median salary for professional actors is ~$47000/yr).
That’s true, which also illustrates how absurd the big paychecks are with your post in mind.
you can’t compare old VHS DVD market to digital one today. it’s completely different with no physical formats. with digital media, unlimited copies can be made with no cost. there’s no friction of having physical medium. youre also saying to go back to a system that completely failed.
even if small companies came about, they will have no budget if only a couple thousand copies are being sold and distributed for the whole community if sold at current prices. basic economics will just cause inflationary pressure and they’ll raise the price to fit the demand too. you need large companies to make large productions.
having a small companies also means nobody has a security blanket. you’ll be working in an industry where if your small studio produce a poor movie, your studio will fail and you’re out of a job.
I think there’s a middle ground. It’s not all or nothing.
We can have million dollar studios without having a billion dollar studio.
A tax on corporate use of AI to fund an artist stipend, to provide a living wage for artists.
There are a lot of independent creators out there too.
The same people who already make the media. Just cut out the corporate middle-men & shareholders, who soak up all the profit and contribute nothing to the content.
deleted by creator
I just imagine a federated, YouTube-like platform. Except better in literally every single way. You are a member of your local community instance, and thereby connected with every other federated instance throughout the world.
Sounds suspiciously like Peertube
As an in-between measure, may I suggest Nebula? Creators get 50% of the earnings, it’s assigned by view time. Price is significantly cheaper than Netflix or YouTube Premium. Yes, most of the creators are on YouTube too, but a lot of them do bonus content on Nebula + there’s no ads + they get more money. If you use an ad blocker on YouTube, the creator gets nothing.
You can get a discount for your first year by using your favourite small-medium size creator’s marketing link (which gives them a bit of money). If you don’t have one, may I suggest Patrick H Willems? He has cool video essays on cinema. You could of course use a bigger creator’s link too, but I figure I’d rather pump some smaller creator’s numbers.
We can do this, once we transition to socialism, and cut out the corporations. Run nodes on the community-owned fiber for free access to the citizens.
What media do you think you’ll be getting under socialism with no corporations? Lol
Propaganda!
You must be joking. The people who make any money producing online content are a very, very small minority.
And if people didn’t have to work 60 hour weeks to barely make enough to survive, we’d get a lot more creative content. All that would change is there wouldn’t be some talentless suit exploiting it.
You wouldn’t be getting any tv shows or movies. You’d be getting YouTube style stuff……like you do now.
People put shows and movies on YouTube already. You’re just not getting corporate backed media on there.
I’m not sure what role you believe capitalists have in creating media, but it’s clearly disproportionate.
You think you’d be getting Avengers: Doomsday in a socialist/communist world?
Tv shows and movies wouldn’t be being created in that world, that’s the point you don’t seem to get.
How do you figure? China has been putting out some of the best big budget stuff in the world this past decade (games & movies), and AI is lowering the barrier to entry for special effects for low budget stuff.
China isn’t pure communism, it’s a unique mix of communism and capitalism.
I don’t even consider the Soviet Union to be very successful socialism, but here you go.
Here’s a 1970s sci-fi noir movie from Soviet-occupied Estonia that I would recommend. It’s honestly a pretty cool movie, even if janky. But it’s not like 1970s western movies feel much less janky nowadays.
And inb4 “you only get the state approved media” - well right now you only get the capitalists approved media (so same-same) and also in a functioning socialist society, for bigger art projects like film and TV show, projects get funding from government without being government-initiated. I mean it was the same in the soviet union, but since it was a dictatorship, the government was picky in what was approved.
In fact, best thing about government funding is that there’s a lot less pressure to be commercially successful than with corporate funding. Commercial flops can still have cultural value and the fun thing is, a socialist government as the source of your funding can see that as a value unto itself, whereas a corporation has no value for culture other than the money it can bring in.