The creator of Newgrounds has considered adding ActivityPub support to join the fediverse but is worried it would make their hosting fees untenable by “serving files to millions of people on third party apps“. Can anyone with more knowledge on how this works help them?
https://www.newgrounds.com/bb...
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!
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.
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.
With Tumblr joining ActivityPub soon enough™ we're already going to see the impact on hosting stuff like that. If I were Newgrounds, I'd wait for Tumblr to switch over and see how they do it.
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.
Perhaps for images they'd have to federate just the text and a small thumbnail, and then just the people interested would click through. I wonder if that'd be enough.
It's unfortunate that it's so slow, but IPFS would make a lot of sense for Fediverse content, assuming servers would also become IPFS nodes and bother to pin content posted in their servers.
Unfortunately, very few apps implement the protocol, even fewer implement it efficiently, and it can take seconds per file to resolve new content. On the upside, you'd get a peertube-like system that'd take care of Fediverse hosting with relative ease of development.
The cryptocurrency bros managed to get IPFS working for them, maybe we should give it a shot too.
Various services have the capability to fetch and copy hosted content (Mastodon, Lemmy, many more) but that capability is often restricted for larger files because those free servers don't want to pay the massive bill for hosting video. I bet it's also why Bluesky only recently added video support.
The problem isn't necessarily the federated hosting, but picking who pays the bill. Everyone wants to host fancy text messages, but nobody wants to pay for large files.
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.