Note: I may be slow to update the post title with the current goal progress, but these badges should be automatically updated:

TankieTube is holding its first ever fundraiser! stonks-up

If you’ve found the site of value, and have the means to do so, then please consider becoming a sustaining member through Liberapay! catgirl-happy It’s our preferred method.

https://liberapay.com/TankieTube/donate

We’ve set an ambitious goal of $150 per week, which would cover ~90% of the current server, bandwidth, and storage costs.

Liberapay currently doesn’t support one-time donations, but you can effectively make one by signing up and then cancelling your subscription after the first payment.

Other ways to make a one-time donation, for your convenience:

1) PayPal/Venmo/Credit/Debit [No anonymity]

Pros: Simple, fast, no account creation required

Cons: Your name and address is revealed; it’s not private and anonymous like Liberapay

2) Monero (XMR) [Ultimate OpSec]

8AaqRrPGfzPfGmZbmBc43WQ4BEnTBujbKiNrMcCZWXKo84LfhH8hysNZxV6JhvESmp2XueM4nHg9J6tLf6pKpbH4KH6dTR4

Pros: Untraceable: Neither I nor Liberapay will know your identity. Can bypass sanctions.

Cons: Complicated

What is Monero (XMR)?

The majority of existing cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin and Ethereum, have transparent blockchains. Transactions can be verified and/or traced by anyone in the world. This means that the sending and receiving addresses of these transactions could potentially be linked to real-world identities.

Monero is the only major cryptocurrency where every user is anonymous by default. The sender, receiver, and amount of every single transaction are hidden through the use of three important technologies: Stealth Addresses, Ring Signatures, and RingCT.

If you buy Monero on a public exchange such as Kraken, then transfer it to a private wallet you control before sending a payment.

  • CommunistCuddlefish [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
    0·
    9 days ago

    Thank you for running TankieTube!  I’m wondering, could we save you on costs by deleting old movies from watch parties, or is storage not a big part of the ongoing cost? If deleting old movie night films would help, perhaps we can organize a way to redistribute / decentralize it.

    • TankieTanuki [he/him]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
      0·
      6 days ago

      Storage is about half the ongoing costs.

      If the movie is bad and you have no intention of ever watching it again, then I suppose you may as well delete it. On the other hand, having a large library of quality or rare content is a boon to the site, so please keep anything that’s good and well-organized/labeled. Deleting videos also deletes their views from the global views counter, which makes me slightly sad.

      A lot of the storage bloat is due to “abuse” by users unrelated to Hexbear and has resulted from my failure to crack down and set a reasonable policy, so don’t feel guilty.

      As for redistributing/decentralizing videos, that may be possible but I think it may be too complex to justify the benefit. It would require me first to migrate from BackBlaze to a custom storage server and configure PeerTube to serve videos from the filesystem instead. That’s something I’d like to do anyway, but once the capital is expended for it, the ongoing storage costs will be pretty low, which greatly reduces the relative benefit to decentralizing the videos. It would also require other people to setup and maintain a high-availability web server.

    • Edie [it/it/its/its/itself, she/her/her/hers/herself]@lemmy.encryptionin.spaceEnglish
      0·
      8 days ago

      If you didn’t see TankieTanuki’s comment down below:

      Videos storage is $6.95/TB/mo. The site stats say it has 36 TB of video ($250/mo), but the BackBlaze bucket actually holds 63 TB right now ($440/mo), partly because I’ve been retaining the deleted videos for fear of accidentally losing content through an error (I recently shortened the deleted retention period to 30 days, so it should drop off by a lot soon), and partly because unlisted videos aren’t included in the site stats.

      The server with bandwidth and traffic upgrades is $339.76/mo, so yes storage is a big part of the cost, in fact over half of it right now. But also, at just $6.95/TB, you’d probably have to delete a number of videos before you would see much of a difference. I mean, I have a copy of nearly 2 hour stream which only ends up taking up 2,8 GiB, even if I said it took up twice the space[1] (6GB) it would require ~166 of them to get up to a TB. Of course, if there is something that is truly not needed anymore, do delete it, over time it adds up.

      1: It’s a greenscreen stream, so it might be more optimized than other vids, that’s why I’m doing this.

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