Bringing 2 more Terabytes to the D.Tube network and some processing power as well

Dtube is one of my most used and favorite Dapps, and for that reason I think I should give a helping hand in providing resources to the network. I delegated to Dtube a few months back, so when others get a Dtube upvote they will get a little love from me too. As every time I got that dutbe upvote I was quite delighted and want to share that feeling with others too.

After learning more about D.Tube and getting a basic understanding of how the network functions. I wanted to be a part of it, just as a miner doing proof of work. Or a masternode doing proof of stake and handling transactions, I there are other roles in the decentralized world that I can join in.

After using d.tube for a few years now, ive experienced many issues. Like queuing taking freezing or having to wait hours for my video in line. Or sometimes the network stops accepting videos altogether. This seemed to get worse as the community grew, and I think it probably has to do with the loads being put on these servers. I hope by bringing my processing power, storage and overall resources to the network I will be able to make these issues less of occurrence.

Source: vaultec's cover

https://steempeak.com/dtube/@vaultec/dtube-ipfs-full-community-node-contest

Last week @vaultec announced rewards for the top five performing nodes. @theycallmedan sponsors the event. With my interest in being involved in decentralized networks and an incentive of earning SBD/Steem by operating such a node I decided to build one.

Joining the #OneLoveDTube Discord I started asking questions, like how much memory, CPU and storage is needed. I watched what others posted regarding their server stats, and saw HDD space was the most important it would seem. Some had 80GB, others had 120GB and some had a few 1000GB.

Source: Solominer

I hope to help build new roads on the internet, a better decentralized internet where everyone online can participate and have their content be seen. Not be deplatformed because your voice is the wrong one, or saying things going against the grain. Like we are seeing on YouTube, you can lose your ability to share your content with the world if your content is not agreed with upon the moderators of the platform. Regardless of legality, you can find yourself banned for saying the wrong words, sentences or even posting memes. I have seen the aftermath of these events of mainstream social media sites and it never seems to be handled fairly.

By building these new roads, using blockchain techology, chainquery tied with local SQL databases, IPFS, rocksDB, DHT and other protocols. We can build front ends like D.tube, LBRY, and other seemly similar platforms that look and feel like Twitter, Reddit, Facebook and Youtube.

By having these platforms working, with enough resources I believe “if we build it, they will come.” Especially in a time where people are being banned left and right, mostly right from these mainstream platforms. Even at the digression and request of large media platforms, the control of the mainstream media is being shown to have a major hold in most platforms most people use. I long ago cut the cable from most of these platforms, and do not publish any content to them as I see no point to build a following just to be banned or silenced or shadowbanned.

Eventhough there are still disagreements on our decentralized crypto platforms all the time, they never result in bans. Usually just nasty comments go back and forth until one or both parties get tired and stop. Or sometimes they downvote which is part of how we built the community. If you disagree downvote, and it seems to work great.

Lets talk about my IPFS server, its a OpenVZ VPS hosted on Time4VPS. It has 1 CPU, 2GB of RAM, 2048GB of storage and 16TB of bandwidth. Sounds like a pretty good system for a IPFS D.tube node.

While talking with members of the #OneLoveDTube Discord, I asked where their servers were located. Some most were in France, some in Germany, Canada and scatted around the United States. Wanting to spread the effect of a decentralized network, my choice of Times4VPS had a lot to do with their location.

My VPS is located in Vilnius the capitol of Lithuania. Looks like a pretty place, maybe one day I can visit the town my server resides.

A map marking locations of mentioned D.tube Servers, and you can see mine the green mark is the eastern most server at the moment. Hopefully this will help users in the region that otherwise had a poor connection to dtube. And by spreading out across the globe, the nodes will be more healthy in the case of regional outages.

Now most of my servers I run are no more than 25-100GB, so my providers I use did not offer very affordable services for such a need for IPFS nodes. I searched the discord for other VPS providers and @graylan posted a very useful reddit post listing a large list of Seedbox VPS providers.

If you do not know what Seedboxes are, its a way to store torrented videos, music or data online and off your local computer and internet provider. These VPS need a lot of hard disk space to operate, so some VPS providers have started appealing services for such users.

My needs are similar, for the IPFS network. Storing lots of videos and index data for the headmaster. Its going to cost me about $15 a month, including my “foreign transaction fees” my credit card company charges. GRR.. another reason blockchain is better, none of these extra fees.. Well unless the network is congested but thats another story with miner fees. So I plan on paying in cryptocurrency in the future to opt out of paying those silly fees, the equivalent of long distance fees for credit cards.. such crooks. These are some of the mainstream networks I want to move away from, Visa, Mastercard and Paypal due to their fees.

I ran it by the #OneLoveDTube Discord community and they said it looks pretty good. So I bought it and go to setting up the usual basics, and followed the guide written by @vaultec

Basic setup only took me about 30 minutes, and still going back and forth with @vaultec to get it customized and optimized for my server. @vaultec is very busy so I must work to their schedule and wait between steps as we go back and forth online. Soon enough ill be joining @cityofstars and @jrawsthorne as a community node operator.

I want to give special thanks to @crimsonclad @graylan @vaultec @jiggytom @eonwarped @sto1cnate @blockops @techcoderx @moonunit and others for taking the time to explain how protocols tie into decentralized networks. These talks have sparked my interest and have made me apply my knowledge and understanding by building out servers to help the communities I use and am a part of and most of all believe in so much.

So hopefully by later this week, if your uploading or playing a video. It may be my server doing the work.

#dapps #infrastructure #vps #lithuania #decentralized #decentralization #mining #node #server