I am aware of the problems and have had similar thoughts about how best to deal with the taxing reality of streamed video, but I think the reality of it is, while already fighting the network effect and ad budgets, someone that downloads an app and see it saps half their battery for that day because they liked 5 videos and left, they are going to uninstall it.

The tech is already most of the way there.

Consider this.

There is already a type of community that has developed sets of rules and incentive structures such that they have created a distributed service with petabytes of storage for content and gigabits of excess bandwidth for delivery.

This service is in such demand that people will voluntarily study for and take a test (waiting hours in line for their 1 on 1 interview/test). This is in addition to their buying/renting their own storage and bandwidth and adding it to the pool that comprises this service. Much more work than plugging a phone in to charge!

What I'm describing is a private bittorrent tracker community.

They've created a scalable, peer to peer, media storage and retrieval service (for public domain videos and music, which are the best) where you're required to contribute AT LEAST as much as you take (1.0 share ratio).

In addition, by publicly displaying the upload/download statistics about a user's account it has turned into a source of social credit. People seed massively in excess of what they will every download in order to have the highest ratio. The social systems and norms are aligned with the good of the service.

People love the high ratio people, after all everyone loves downloading a 85GB 4k HDR+ copy of It's a Wonderful Life at 15gbps, that's only possible because Joe Ratio has a seedbox on a 50Gb connection serving up classic movies(super classic and old) for clout.

You don't even have to worry about having movies downloaded in advance when you can just have your seedbox grab your favorite Charlie Chaplain movie and have it available for streaming directly from the seedbox in less time than it takes to grab a glass of water.

Take the model of a public tracker and create a decentralized messaging system around it (I think there is one or two projects like that already floating around but the names escape me). Bittorrent already has a distributed hash table (DHT) service which can completely replace a centrally hosted tracker or run along-side hosted trackers.

You are also right that it would have to be easy, but that's possible. Signal has some of the most advanced encryption systems available but to the average user it's just text messaging. There are some talented frontend developers and UX designers out there but that's not my lane and I have confidence in them.

It's a neat idea to think about, at least

I think the answer is AV1. You can get good quality video into 500 NB per hour which is easily affordable with unobtrusive ads like a banner at the bottom of the app and a video ad that can be swapped away every 10 videos.

Oh that makes sense, in this case it would need something like a toggle to only share data on WIFI, kinda like Google Photos and Immich do

Maybe predownload videos on WIFI (Tiktok already has this function) and only use mobile data for comments and replies, and asking the user in case they are on mobile data if they want to download videos on demand.

Anyways, I was thinking on ways to make it work without the crypto while keeping the P2P aspect. Thanks for the explanation.

It is possible to be private without being suspicious by using a stock Firefox or Brave profile on mobile data.

It could be the mail alias. Most platforms have rules against disposable email addresses.