a Freyja project
P2P video streaming for the Entertainment system. The more people watch, the stronger the network. No advertising required.
Lucille Ball was the most-watched person in the history of television. She was also, less famously, the first woman to run a major Hollywood production company. Desilu Productions, which she bought out from under her ex-husband, went on to produce Star Trek, Mission: Impossible, and The Untouchables. She didn't just perform. She built the infrastructure.
Naming video infrastructure after her is the right call.
“The point is for it to get so popular it breaks. Then we'll know we're doing something right.”
— Zach, from the Lucille README (Claude found this gem — Zach didn't put it here himself)Streaming video at scale costs money. Bandwidth, storage, encoding, CDN. It all adds up fast, and it adds up faster the more people watch. Centralized platforms solved this the only way they knew how: advertising. Knowing who you are and what you're likely to buy makes the bandwidth costs worth it.
This is why YouTube knows your age, location, watch history, and purchase intent. The video is the bait. You are the product. The advertisers are the customer.
The platform is not neutral infrastructure. It is a surveillance operation that also streams video as a side effect.
BitTorrent solved the bandwidth problem a different way. When you stream a video, you simultaneously seed it to other viewers. The bandwidth comes from the audience itself. The more people watch, the more bandwidth the network has. The opposite of centralized streaming, which gets more expensive with every new viewer.
Lucille uses WebTorrent to bring this to the browser. While you're watching, you're helping everyone else watch. Lucille doesn't track whether you seed or not. You can turn it off if you'd like. The network is grateful either way.
No ad-supported revenue model required. The P2P layer eliminates the cost structure that makes surveillance profitable.
Video posters upload through a client application. The first is a plugin for Federated Wiki, which handles upload, storage, and seeding. Videos live in distributed storage, seeded to a WebTorrent tracker, accessible via magnet link. No single platform controls who can post.
Watchers stream through any compatible viewer: browser-based, via the federated wiki, or any client that speaks WebTorrent. Playback is seamless. The torrent protocol runs in the background. If you've ever watched a video on YouTube, you already know how this should feel.
Storage: DigitalOcean Spaces. Seeding: WebTorrent. Tracking: a lightweight WebSocket tracker. Auth: sessionless. The whole stack is self-hostable.