this post was submitted on 28 Jan 2026
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Honestly the best way I've seen this handled is how Odysee did it. There's crypto involved, but ignoring that, they essentially just asked users to choose to allocate an amount of their hard drive/bandwith to be used for storing, and sharing videos.
That would work better from an end user perspective, rather than running their data usage up, and using storage on a storage-limited device like a phone, and I'm sure there's a way to incentivize it that isn't crypto
I don't get it, isn't sharing videos generating data usage? I need to check how that works
It would be, I forgot to mention an important piece: Cellular data is typically metered relatively strictly (most plans I've seen allow "unlimited", but it's usually slowed way down if you use more than 10-15gb in a month) where most home internet connections aren't, and with something like TikTok the expected use is mobile. If we're going with the like = seed option, that does imply the seeding is happening from the device that liked the video.
With the Odysee model, I could set up my home PC (on an unmetered* connection) to have, say, 250gb set aside for videos to be shared from. It would be an intentional act that is unambiguously using up some bandwidth/data, and can't be as easily misunderstood by the end user. Maybe find some way to incentivise it (preferably not crypto, but I do dislike this implementation of crypto less than most), but largely I think helping the community would be incentive for enough people to keep the network going, at least for a while.
*They're technically metered, but every internet plan I've seen limits you to terabytes of data up/down, not gigabytes