Most of this comment was my own speculation based on the details they’ve shared publicly. The details I know of publicly are:

• The seem to be profitable. Or at least in a relatively sustainable place; they talk about profit a lot, but usually in terms of how the “profit” is split between creators. I forget, maybe the Wendover “history of Nebula” video from a while back talked more specifically about profitability?
• They’re choosing not to take outside investment. This is something the CEO, Dave Wiskus, talked about particularly with respect to the Lifetime subscriptions, describing those as their option for building up the sort of large amounts of cash that they might otherwise have gone to outside investment for, in order to fund bigger projects
• The fact that they are, quite visibly, expanding their range of content

The rest was me speculating about how the business model would seem to work based on those factors plus my limited, layperson’s, understanding of their industry.

I will check these out

FWIW the specific channels I recommended were mostly based on stalking your user profile and grabbing a couple I thought might interest you based on that. But I didn’t have much to go on from your Lemmy history specifically. They weren’t necessarily the first ones I’d recommend to someone in the general public, or to someone whose interests I knew better.

if only I could figure out how to use peertube

From my experience trying Peertube, its biggest problem for now is just…the server infrastructure of existing instances isn’t very good. I got really bad buffering. Maybe better server-side encoding could have helped with that. Maybe they need stronger server hardware with better outbound network connections. Maybe I just need to find a more locally-hosted instance to me. Maybe it’s something else. But the user experience was really not good. Which is a shame. As nice as Nebula’s sort of worker-owned co-op model is, true federated video would be really nice for those of us not privileged enough to become a member of the exclusive club. YouTube being basically the only real option really sucks, and I’m sick of alternative options like Gfycat dying off and losing all their content.

From everything I’ve heard, they’re already profitable, and are explicitly choosing only to grow in a sustainable way, without taking on outside investment which could force them into enshittifying down the line. With a relative lack of need to show extreme growth, and a lack of reliance on outside factors like advertising (being subscription-based), the only major risk that I can see for them long-term is user churn. Which is definitely a risk, but with the ever-creeping growth of the range of content they have and (at least for now) an attitude of being customer-friendly, churn seems a relatively low risk.

As far as I can see, at worst, the platform dies if the YouTube channels of the people on the platform die because of the YouTube algorithm, and they get bad churn (with fewer new subscribers because of the aforementioned dead YouTube channels at the top of the funnel), and they don’t get new more successful channels on before that happens. A scenario that’s far from unlikely, but which I would describe as “catastrophic, whether or not Nebula exists today”, so its existence for now as a hedge against more likely bad scenarios is still worthwhile.

I’ve never heard of dropout or nebula. At all

I must admit, I find that astonishing. Not that the average person on the street wouldn’t have heard of them, but that someone online enough to be having these sorts of conversations wouldn’t have.

Are you familiar with CollegeHumor, perhaps? After their corporate owners got screwed around by Facebook’s pivot to video (and the fraudulent data involved), they were going to shut down CH entirely until the head of the creative group reached an agreement to buy it out, and under his ownership he created the private streaming service Dropout. Today it’s mostly entirely private, with promotional content like the occasional episode or clips uploaded as Shorts put onto YouTube.

Nebula got its start as a sort of multi-channel network owned by and for YouTube creators, to avoid many of the big pitfalls that MCNs became known for. Its earliest more well-known members are Sam from Wendover/Half As Interesting, Brian from Real Engineering, Colin from CGP Grey, and Philip from Kursgesagt. The latter two later left over “creative differences” (leaks have seemed to imply, basically, that they wanted to keep it a small elite group at the core which could profit from increased growth while adding more creators, while the rest of the people then involved wanted a more equitable arrangement). It’s since grown to way too many channels to name, but if you’re interested you can see the full list here. A few choice selections might include tech reporter TechAltar (whose recent “1 month without US tech giants” and the Nebula Plus follow-up “Which alternatives am I sticking with?” video are reminiscent of the one this thread is about), astrophysicist Angela Collier, Canadian cultural commentator J.J. McCullough, history & video game design analysis channels Extra History & Extra Credits, TLDR News, human geography (with a focus on conflicts) from RealLifeLore. Linus from LTT has talked about Nebula once or twice, though his commentary on it gets wildly wrong, claiming it was a sort of pump & dump scheme where the main goal was to sell to private equity or something, seemingly because he’s projecting his own techbro capitalist attitude onto them. As I sort of mentioned above, Nebula basically serves as an uber-patreon. You pay a single subscription fee (when I signed up it was $30 per year, but it may have changed) to get mostly content that could be gotten for free (but with ads) on YouTube, plus some bonus content, some stuff a bit earlier, and a few Nebula Originals. Lindsay Ellis might be the most notable one there. Since getting harassed off the Internet by Twitter, all her videos have been Nebula Originals apart from 2 promoting her new book.

Neither of these are really meant to be a complete YouTube replacement, but rather a way for them to create more control over their stuff and get the stability of knowing they aren’t relying on the fickle YouTube algorithm (and the whims of YouTube censorship).

It’s not easy, but you’re not guaranteed to end up

either lose your shirt, sell your business, or become entrenched in a position whose inertia is difficult to break

It depends on the personalities involved and the business model they go with.

Nebula has done really well with consistent growth as a premium offering where people pay one subscription fee to get ad-free videos from exclusively high-quality creators across a quote broad range of niches, in addition to bonus extras and Nebula Originals.

Dropout seems to have a lot of success with a range of mostly unscripted comedy, centred around a core cast of trusted comedic actors with a larger range of guests.

Floatplane, on the other hand, seems much less successful, probably owing to its business model being basically Patreon’s, but only for video. Instead of the wide range of content you get for surprisingly reasonable amounts of Nebula and Dropout, Floatplane ends up looking very expensive if you want to support more than one or two creators. Plus the creators on it haven’t got the same degree of trust; it ends up reeking of the sort of techbro vibes that people are explicitly trying to get away from.

Well, there is Nebula, which is kinda like that. But most of them also put their videos on YouTube, using Nebula as the premium ad-free option with a little bonus content.

the official app tries to not be killed by Android woth the usual tricks (permanent notification, disabling battery optimisation)

…

You can (theoretically) control how often locations are tracked and sent but for me was using the location service constantly and draining battery quite a bit.

Ah. Those are exactly what I was worried about. It’s not able to just happen entirely in the background the same way Google’s feature does, then? Kind of automagically?

But not exactly how the app works. If it’s a Strava-like app you have to remember to run in the foreground, the value is a lot lower to me than something that either uses or replicates GPS’ automatic background behaviour.

How exactly does it work from your phone’s perspective? Does it hook into Google Play Services location data? Do you need to install a different low-level application that replicates that functionality? (If so, what’s the battery life impact like?) Does it need a foregrounded app?

I’m really interested in this, because like the author I’m really upset at Google killing yet another incredibly useful feature. But the article is a little light on details.

Where do you get torrents these days? I’ve not been doing much game piracy for nearly a decade, and TPB seems to be a shell of what it once was.

It’s a subsystem of Windows

If I say “the life support system for the USS Enterprise”, nobody thinks that that’s a system running on the life support that gives you the USS Enterprise. It’s a system running on the USS Enterprise that gives you life support. Windows Subsystem for Linux sounds like it’s a system running on Linux that gives you access to Windows.

Good post.

Wrong community.

He also went on Reddit and defended his statements by saying he wasn’t familiar with American politics and he’s sorry if he triggered people. So he’s claiming to be unaware of thing because he doesn’t engage in American politics, and at the exact same time, he’s using right-wing talking points like misusing the term “triggered” to mean “upset left-leaning people”. Something he could only have picked up if he’s lurking in right-wing spaces.

IMO a “simple browser” of this sort should display literally only the content in the HTML file itself. It shouldn’t even view CSS stored in a separate local CSS file, let alone reach out to the web to download more content.

Hardly the first time Spanish courts have completely fucking failed to understand technology (I will never get over how monumentally stupid the Mario Costeja case was), but this manages to take it to an incredible new level. The idiotic lack of forethought asside, you’d think that once the consequences were made clear and people were actively being prevented from accessing all sorts of legitimate websites, including GitHub, they’d immediately reverse course. How the fuck does one private sporting company gain the right to force a huge swathe of the Internet to be blocked, anyway? Utter fucking nonsense.

Fuck yeah Randall is based af.

Honestly I can’t even figure out how to get that alpine-chrome image to work. I edited my Dockerfile to say

FROM zenika/alpine-chrome:with-puppeteer

instead of

FROM node:22

I tried changing USER node to USER chrome. I removed all the apt-get dependencies that were needed to get Puppeteer working in Docker on my PC in the first instance, and added --chown=chrome to my COPY package.json line, all as described in the with-puppeteer example. I also added the ENV lines from that. (I also tried various combinations of some of the aforementioned changes but not others.) Now I get an error with the npm install step.

15.44 npm ERR! code 1
15.44 npm ERR! path /usr/src/app/node_modules/canvas
15.44 npm ERR! command failed
15.44 npm ERR! command sh -c prebuild-install -r napi || node-gyp rebuild
15.45 npm ERR! prebuild-install warn install No prebuilt binaries found (target=7 runtime=napi arch=x64 libc=musl platform=linux)
15.45 npm ERR! gyp info it worked if it ends with ok
15.45 npm ERR! gyp info using node-gyp@8.4.1
15.45 npm ERR! gyp info using node@20.15.1 | linux | x64
15.45 npm ERR! gyp info find Python using Python version 3.11.10 found at "/usr/bin/python3"
15.45 npm ERR! gyp http GET https://nodejs.org/download/release/v20.15.1/node-v20.15.1-headers.tar.gz
15.45 npm ERR! gyp http 200 https://nodejs.org/download/release/v20.15.1/node-v20.15.1-headers.tar.gz
15.45 npm ERR! gyp http GET https://nodejs.org/download/release/v20.15.1/SHASUMS256.txt
15.45 npm ERR! gyp http 200 https://nodejs.org/download/release/v20.15.1/SHASUMS256.txt
15.45 npm ERR! gyp info spawn /usr/bin/python3
15.45 npm ERR! gyp info spawn args [
15.45 npm ERR! gyp info spawn args   '/usr/src/app/node_modules/node-gyp/gyp/gyp_main.py',
15.45 npm ERR! gyp info spawn args   'binding.gyp',
15.45 npm ERR! gyp info spawn args   '-f',
15.45 npm ERR! gyp info spawn args   'make',
15.45 npm ERR! gyp info spawn args   '-I',
15.45 npm ERR! gyp info spawn args   '/usr/src/app/node_modules/canvas/build/config.gypi',
15.45 npm ERR! gyp info spawn args   '-I',
15.45 npm ERR! gyp info spawn args   '/usr/src/app/node_modules/node-gyp/addon.gypi',
15.45 npm ERR! gyp info spawn args   '-I',
15.45 npm ERR! gyp info spawn args   '/home/chrome/.cache/node-gyp/20.15.1/include/node/common.gypi',
15.45 npm ERR! gyp info spawn args   '-Dlibrary=shared_library',
15.45 npm ERR! gyp info spawn args   '-Dvisibility=default',
15.45 npm ERR! gyp info spawn args   '-Dnode_root_dir=/home/chrome/.cache/node-gyp/20.15.1',
15.45 npm ERR! gyp info spawn args   '-Dnode_gyp_dir=/usr/src/app/node_modules/node-gyp',
15.45 npm ERR! gyp info spawn args   '-Dnode_lib_file=/home/chrome/.cache/node-gyp/20.15.1/<(target_arch)/node.lib',
15.45 npm ERR! gyp info spawn args   '-Dmodule_root_dir=/usr/src/app/node_modules/canvas',
15.45 npm ERR! gyp info spawn args   '-Dnode_engine=v8',
15.45 npm ERR! gyp info spawn args   '--depth=.',
15.45 npm ERR! gyp info spawn args   '--no-parallel',
15.45 npm ERR! gyp info spawn args   '--generator-output',
15.45 npm ERR! gyp info spawn args   'build',
15.45 npm ERR! gyp info spawn args   '-Goutput_dir=.'
15.45 npm ERR! gyp info spawn args ]
15.45 npm ERR! Package pixman-1 was not found in the pkg-config search path.
15.45 npm ERR! Perhaps you should add the directory containing `pixman-1.pc'
15.45 npm ERR! to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable
15.45 npm ERR! Package 'pixman-1', required by 'virtual:world', not found
15.45 npm ERR! gyp: Call to 'pkg-config pixman-1 --libs' returned exit status 1 while in binding.gyp. while trying to load binding.gyp
15.45 npm ERR! gyp ERR! configure error
15.45 npm ERR! gyp ERR! stack Error: `gyp` failed with exit code: 1
15.45 npm ERR! gyp ERR! stack     at ChildProcess.onCpExit (/usr/src/app/node_modules/node-gyp/lib/configure.js:259:16)
15.45 npm ERR! gyp ERR! stack     at ChildProcess.emit (node:events:519:28)
15.45 npm ERR! gyp ERR! stack     at ChildProcess._handle.onexit (node:internal/child_process:294:12)
15.45 npm ERR! gyp ERR! System Linux 6.10.14-linuxkit
15.45 npm ERR! gyp ERR! command "/usr/bin/node" "/usr/src/app/node_modules/.bin/node-gyp" "rebuild"
15.45 npm ERR! gyp ERR! cwd /usr/src/app/node_modules/canvas
15.45 npm ERR! gyp ERR! node -v v20.15.1
15.45 npm ERR! gyp ERR! node-gyp -v v8.4.1
15.45 npm ERR! gyp ERR! not ok
15.45
[+] Running 0/1A complete log of this run can be found in: /home/chrome/.npm/_logs/2025-02-18T01_04_35_846Z-debug-0.log
 - Service node  Building                                                                                         18.9s
failed to solve: process "/bin/sh -c npm install" did not complete successfully: exit code: 1

Which I just now (after posting) noticed was already mentioned in a different comment. Sorry!

I’m guessing the user who made that other comment is on lemmy.world? I can’t see any comment other than yours, and LW has known issues with federation (issues that would be fixed if the instance weren’t 5 version behind…) that mean I probably won’t be able to see it for about 2 days right now. So thanks!

I haven’t looked into the suggestion in great detail yet, but I will say I’m already running as a non-root user (USER node is a line in my Dockerfile). I’m not sure what a seccomp profile is, but in case it wasn’t clear from the original post, I just want to emphasise that the current configuration works in Docker on my Windows PC. It’s only on the Synology NAS that it fails.

Personally I’m not enormously worried about SSH, because I’m behind NAT anyway, but yeah it’s definitely still something I’d rather keep off if not in use.

Is there a way to get a terminal on the Synology itself, or is SSH from my PC the only way?