The past, present and uncertain future of scene-run infrastructure
category: general [glöplog]
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*** The past, present and uncertain future of scene-run infrastructure ***
I share some of these concerns.
And I agree the existing infrastructures are often taken for granted, with poor recognition for those behind them.
That said, I don't think we should aim to have a scene-run infrastructure for *everything*.
The Internet is not what is was 20 years ago, and we should accept it and embrace the new behaviors, while keeping a critical perspective, of course.
(For example: is it really such a problem that short-lived public conversations have shifted from IRC to Discord?)
Also, big corps are hard to compete with when it comes to reliability, ease of use, audience/outreach, and even longevity.
Trying to replace-them-all will only lead to frustration, disappointment, and burnout.
We must choose our battles wisely.
IMHO, the primary focus should be on the preservation of demoscene productions.
And I think we desperately need a reliable scene-run platform to index and archive video captures of demoscene productions for the long term.
(Basically what capped.tv tried to be)
Because the binaries aren't sufficient to be able to watch a demo 10+ years later (of if you don't have the proper hardware).
YouTube serves this role right now, but it's not ideal because recompression + ads + no direct way to dl the video for offline use + videos/channels can disappear.
I'm concerned about how I cannot easily run some of not-so-old productions, or how YouTube captures can vanish without any warning and are not necessarily replaced.
It's great that we already have many people (and parties) making great hq captures.
And I personally run my own little video capture archives (composed from youtube dumps & video files found here and there ; happy to share it) ; others seem to do that too.
However, I feel that a proper, collective, and unified effort to address this matter is needed.
(I was actually really pleased to learn a little while ago that SceneCity had plans regarding this.)
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i see the solution not in building yet another infrastructure, but in supporting the most open and reliable ones that are around - and these, for me, are demozoo and scene.org. especially the latter is probably the most solid and ulikely-to-fail scene infrastructure, as it's hosted by a university and mirrored by a dozen of servers worldwide - so it should take a global catastrophy to bring scene.org down (and in that case, there will be more important things to carry about than the scene, anyway).
I agree.
(also, regarding scene.org, the non-profit structure is reassuring).
It would make sense for scene.org to tackle the issue of video capture preservation.
Do you know if this is something that has been considered?
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Btw. fyi. I am working on a sleek, modern platform to consume and comment on demos built on top of the demozoo database, if it'll ever come to fruition / a public release is still uncertain though.
Interesting.
What is wrong with the demozoo comment feature exactly? (honest question)