pbisen / homie

homie

A Decentralized Short Form Video platform focussing on Landscape content, empowering traditional creators. Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZSFs1pm3ak

Deployment: https://hey-homie.herokuapp.com (Down for Maintainence :(, will be up soon).. (please refer to the video for a demo)

Chain: Matic Testnet.

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Problems solved by homie

1. Improving Creator Economics

Currently, the platform of choice for a majority of creators is on Youtube and Twitch. Both of them offer mainly two monetization options.

• A cut from the ad revenue on the platform
• Direct Donations (Superchats / Dono's) from the users.

Both of these platforms currently take an approximately 50% cut of the revenue generated by the creator on their platform, to facilitate the hosting of their content.

Creators don't want the platform to reduce their share to zero, most creators both big and small are happy to share a portion of their revenue with the platform, as long as it is a fair share, to help the platform improve, improving user experience. With a reduction in costs due to the use of decentralized platforms, we can transfer the benefit to boost creator revenues.

2. Boosting Discoverability for Landscape Content

Short-form video content has propelled the content game to the next level. We have seen insane growth in discoverability on these platforms, allowing creators to focus more on their content and less on optimizations for the algorithm.

But there is a problem, all major platforms in the space focus on Vertical form video content, even on desktop. So traditionally landscape content like Gaming, Streaming, Video Podcasts have to either change their entire production process to ensure compatibility or create vertical crops that ruin the user experience.

3. Censorship Resistance

Using blockchain comes with the innate benefit that the platform is inherently censorship-resistant. Leading social platforms are currently facing strong criticism about their censorship policies.

Challenges that I ran into

1. Hosting Costs

• Traditional Video storage costs are calculated on the basis of the frequency of access. Being a Video Social Media Platform, this becomes an issue, because you want the number of users grow, your costs grow rapidly with them. This is not a scalable solution.
• Enter Web3.Storage, It allows us to store all of our data, at NO COSTS! Web3.Storage is able to do this by using IPFS and crypto-economics to subsidize costs.

2. Improving User Experience

• Currently, whenever a user interacts with a platform, they don't pay a fee to use it. This is because the platform uses its revenues and transfers the costs to itself. So, asking them to pay a fee, however small, every time they upload a video or follow a creator would ruin the user experience and dissuade users from using the platform.
• Enter Mexa by Biconomy, It introduced us to the notion of gasless transactions, allowing us to transfer the gas costs from the users onto the platform. This allowed us to provide the service of Uploading Videos and following a Creator as a gasless transaction. Special Thanks to Yashasvi and livingrock for clearing our doubts.
• But on L1 Ethereum both Transaction Costs and Time are very high, this was also taken care of thanks to Polygon. During our initial development we were testing the contract on the Kovan testnet, Since porting over to Polygon Mumbai, both of them reduced approximately 500 times.

3. Decentralized Web App Deployment

• In a bid to make the app completely decentralized, we started looking into decentralized solutions to deploy and manage our app. Spheron helped us fulfill this.
• During the initial deployments, the entire Spheron team and especially Abhinit, set aside time to clear our queries to get us started.
• But in our following revisions, we needed to change our node environment to be able to run our app. After talking to them about this, they have now added this on their roadmap and we will be back on Spheron soon.

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Screenshots: