YouTube might be the biggest challenge yet given the extraordinary amount of storage needed to recreate it.
Its also getting the content creators onto the new platform. Thats a bigger challenge I think, without creators it's a dead site really, and making videos is significantly more difficult than image or text posting.
For storage, if we assume the format would be WebM at 1080p, 60fps and 20 minutes in length, it turns out to about 1GB. Even a cheap VPS instance usually offer 50GB of storage (with not too expensive storage upgrades).
So if its distributed evenly, we can host a good bit of videos (nothing compared to YouTube though).
Its nearly impossible to replicate what YouTube it is today. The amount of storage and bandwith require is immense, also the creators coming up to a new platform without a way to get money it will really hard to have something like YouTube.
Its nearly impossible to replicate what YouTube it is today.
Why would we want to? People want to replace Youtube because Youtube sucks ass. Replacing it with another monetized platform will only ever lead to the same place Youtube is at now.
It sucks that people who managed to make a living from their hobby have gotten fucked over, but until we have some major regulatory and economic overhauls, that's just how it works. Changing platforms is not a solution to that.
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Because what's the point otherwise. Let's just make a YouTube without videos. That will surely work.
Let's not forget that there's money to be earned by being a youtube person. Creating a model that would make this possible in a federated approach would be bonkers as hell and probably just invite predatory dipshits who then lure creators with seemingly good offers and then start to hold them hostage in ways YouTube hasn't dared so far.
lure creators with seemingly good offers and then start to hold them hostage in ways YouTube hasn't dared so far.
Like Smosh?
Young up and coomers, first giants on YouTube. Sold their channel and brand for stock. Then were tied to the company for years who worked them like dogs. Until the company that bought them went bankrupt so their stock was nullified and they in the end sold their company for $0.
I wouldn't say YouTube was free from it
Most professional YouTubers survive primarily off of Patreon support and sponsored videos. YouTube ads provide only a small fraction of what they earn. If they could increase their Patreon or sponsorship income by cross-posting to PeerTube, then they could be enticed to do so. The current issue there is that sponsors are going to want accurate analytics, and PeerTube isn't going to be able to offer the kind of depth of audience analysis that YouTube can.
The problem is, the cost of hosting videos -- both in terms of storage and in terms of bandwidth -- is kind of prohibitive. That part needs to be solved.
The reality is that most content creators will not switch platforms because it guarantees a significant loss of viewership. Ad reads won't pay much if you're only talking to a fraction of your audience.
While I agree in spirit, what other option is there in a capitalist society? Paying a subscription fee for every single service or every single content creator? Not sure people are going to go for that en masse.
So if its distributed evenly, we can host a good bit of videos (nothing compared to YouTube though).
I read 500 hours of content are uploaded to YouTube every minute. Obviously a lot of that is low quality, but we're still talking a lot of content unless we're suggesting the creators host it themselves (which could work for a small subset of folks if it were enough of a turnkey solution).
60fps
Correct me if I’m wrong but I would guess that the majority of YouTube videos are at 30fps, right? I only want 60fps for gaming/sports clips
Convincing content creators to upload their videos to multiple platforms will be easy, as will uploading their old work
You just end up with a chicken and egg situation with viewers and creators.
The fediverse doesn't make money and it shouldn't. YouTube is fine unless some other business makes a decent competitor.
Yeah I think most people thinking we can just replace YouTube do not understand the scale of their operation. What YouTube does is many many orders of magnitude bigger and more complex than anything happening on the fediverse. PeerTube is a joke by comparison. There is a reason that even when VC money was flowing like crazy, nobody was able to even think about launching a competitor.
On top of that, no platform can seek to replace YouTube without offering the same or better creator compensation. Free services will never meet that.
Someone needs to invent middle-out compression and install it on a network of smart fridges
Couldn't get past the third season of that show. Got too repetitive. Is it worth finishing?
Not sure, I have almost finished S05 and still find it hilarious. Have to watch more to form a final opinion
Yeah, this is the one I don't see happening.
Look at Twitch. Microsoft, Facebook, and (somewhat) Google have attempted to dethrone them and they've all failed. Things like Rumble and Kick are still going, and Kick may have a slight chance.
But that's a much smaller platform, that everyone agrees is absolute garbage and trying to kill itself at every turn. YouTube would be a much bigger challenge.
Peertube works well so far, I use this instance which specialises in hosting music creative stuff https://rankett.net/w/nqE8nNjbau7Q5UuDFCMT9z
Torrents are peer to peer. The storage comes exclusively from seeders. If nobody is seeding a torrent, and nobody has the data, it is dead and the data no longer exists.
I'm not sure what it takes but TILVids doesn't seem to have a problem loading videos...
You might not get 4k but is that really important?
TILVids has orders of magnitude less usage than YouTube, both in terms of storage and bandwidth.
Generally speaking you can expect to hit one bottleneck or another whenever you grow one order of magnitude, and fixing these becomes harder each time.
TILVids has orders of magnitude less usage than YouTube, both in terms of storage and bandwidth.
You're not wrong but again, does that really matter? I can watch videos and they look just as good to my eye as they do on YT.
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That depends on what you want. Folks where talking about a YouTube replacement. If TILVids is that for you right now and you don't expect more content there then it's all good.
I literally have like 1TB of video stored on YouTube and privatized. Google is making $0 from my videos, but they still have to store them and have them available if I want to watch it (it's all of my Twitch VODs). Meanwhile websites like Streamable perma-delete my 5MB video after it gets 0 views in 2 milliseconds.
YouTube is a behemoth that will not be replaced.
I mean you're right that YouTube isn't going anywhere, but they're going to either delete that data or start charging you for it at some point
I'm shocked they haven't already. A good 95% of YouTube could be deleted and no one would notice, and would save Google millions and millions of dollars.
If they did that, I wouldn't be able to find a fix for the fuel line getting kinked in my BG86 leaf blower. You know that video with 48 views that exactly solves the problem I am having? Same applies across basically every niche device or mechanical issue and is one of the primary reasons I find myself on youtube.
Fair point! However, your argument is almost more reason for Google to do it.
You find yourself on YouTube for those niche videos, which means you're the kind of customer YouTube would benefit from getting rid of. A few dozen views from you per year to find niche videos, is not paying them anything, and is wasting a ton of storage. They want people who spend hours upon hours on YouTube per day, essentially replacing TV. Those who spend hours and hours on YouTube, are also generally watching popular videos, or videos that YouTube is recommending, which means a ton of ad views, or even YouTube Premium subscriptions.
I would absolutely be crushed if YouTube deleted all those random niche videos because I just used one last week to fix my car. Some random ass video showing a potential ground wire issue. I am not saying I want Google to do it, I don't, but I am definitely shocked they aren't.
I pay for premium because I rely on those videos way more than I'm comfortable with.
Finding how to fix a screen issue in my niche 2014 laptop in 2022 was a wild experience.
Sometimes i feel bad for YouTube. Video hosting is the worst of both worlds (heaviest storage and highest bandwidth) and there's a LOT of video on YouTube, most of it worthless.
and they keep the original file as well as their converted file. So every video you upload is stored at least twice. Technically more, because popular videos are stored on multiple servers to ensure fast load times no matter where you live. It's crazy. I would love to see a behind the scenes your of YouTube, and a live stat counter page. It would seem fake.
They are starting to delete the data associated to Google accounts that have not signed in in several years. This includes their YouTube videos. I have started downloading the videos from creators that have passed that I still wish to watch.
That's interesting. My girlfriends old cat videos from over a decade ago are still there. She hasn't logged into the account for years and years.
What happens to videos of people who are no longer alive? Does Google expect a channel to be maintained in perpetuity?
I wouldn't count on that and I'd definitely recommend backups. I had a channel full of videos just disappear and I never found out what happened. I just went to check something one day and it was gone. The videos are all gone. Nobody could help I eventually just had to suck it up. From what I read at the time it happens here and there but not to people big enough for there to ever be a stink about it. Someone said it happens if you don't log on for long enough but I logged in every few months at least for various reasons so I dunno.
Oh I don't. I just move them there because Twitch deletes them after a few days. I don't care about them, it's just an easy 1 click button to save them on YouTube.
In fact I stopped relying on Google services when they banned the Terraria developers Google account and the only way he got it back was by canceling the Stadia release of Terraria.
Since that day, I switched to ProtonMail with a custom domain, immich.app, proton calendar, and more.
Realized that unless I have to power to potentially cost Google millions of dollars, Google won't even look my way.
That's right. You are simply in better hands if you actually pay for a service. If google offers you something for free, they do not really owe you anything, you are not entitled to that service.
I priced it out recently and protonmail is more expensive than paying for Google business email and extra space. I thought about switching but I can't think of a way it will significantly make my life better. I'd rather pay some money so hopefully I'm not the product anymore.
Alphabet is still making money off of you. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/03/google-says-it-doesnt-sell-your-data-heres-how-company-shares-monetizes-and
Yep I have a scheduled task that uploads terabytes worth of empty/noise videos up on to YouTube to take up their hosting space as a final hurrah/middle finger to those corporate fat cats/silicon valley pundits.
Someone mentioned youtube was sending notices to people with private videos, about removing them or making public
Moreover, killing Youtube will be harder than killing any of these social media. Serving video content is very expensive.
The demands of video hosting is what makes me doubtful that decentralized YouTube could work.
It could work if everyone that used it was interested in decentralizing it, but that seems impossible from my perspective
Big mainstream subs are shit but they always were. Cool niche communities are the same.
mostly the same. I feel like even niche places get some of the annoying reddit mentality that has annoyed me for quite a while. There's still the hivemind and circle jerky stuff in small places. It's felt like less of that here, but also only a fraction of the people are on Lemmy so that will change when more people come.
I mean, the circlejerk is already here. This meme shows that. The amount of users saying "fuck spez", as if he gives a shit and is remotely affected is like...bruh.
Nope, sorry: no revolution for you.
All I'm seeing here is a circlejerk if users not understanding that a meme is not a statistical/factual form of acquiring information... they are jokes.
I'm not disagreeing but it's still kicking. My friend who is on reddit said it was weird for a couple days during the blackout but it's back to normal now. He also wondered why I didn't use the official app. Like it or not, most people are like him.
I can't believe this. The official app is so bad, I am losing faith in humanity.
Even if you get rid of the ads (ReVanced manager is your friend) it still pushes weird content into your timeline. Like, you scroll and there is an interesting post that you want to comment on. Oops, posted 20 days ago. Why would you recommend that to me!?
Yeah he mentioned things like that were happening during the blackout but he said it's mostly back to normal for him now. He also watches TV and movies with all sorts of ads. For me, that's an instant pivot to find something else to do. My dad has repeatedly asked me if I want some product he sees in an Instagram ad. I eventually had to tell him to specifically never get me a product he sees in an ad. People on the fediverse aren't normal. We care a lot about things most people don't really mind.
I remember Voat and numerous other attempts to abandon Reddit.
I really hope that this one sticks but it needs to be very robust (in terms of moderation, server capacity, user friendliness etc) if it is going to handle a large influx of users without breaking down.
Agreed. Friends in my discord group still bring up reddit posts daily, usually in subs with games and memes.
Yeah, I think that's because reddit just has the hugest communities for individual games and niche interests. There are some lemmy communities for some of the games I follow but there are like seven users in each of them. Lemmy is getting really good for broader topics like "games" or "technology" but isn't quite there yet for more narrow interests like "Dolphin emulator" for example.
Still kicking but...somehow not the same. It's something I can't quite explain. There's just something different about it now. I had to look something up on Reddit a couple of days ago. It was the first time I'd been back since they killed all the third party apps. It reminded me of going back to a city I used to live but my friends were all gone and my favorite places to go had changed. So, while it was the same place, and there were plenty of people around, it seemed exhausted and forced.
Yeah, no. The deaths of those websites have not happened yet, and when they do, the Fediverse will not be the one holding the scythe
I frankly don't see a way for federated video to happen unless uploads are severely limited or it's paywalled. Even with YouTube's wild compression, you're looking at several gigs for a single 4k video.
Honestly the fact that YouTube exists is a miracle. Video is still just monstrously large.
I hadn't dealt with video in years (like 2008) and recently used my Canon R6 to record a few seconds of 4k footage.
After getting over being annoyed at the camera stopping due to overheating after just 5 minutes, I was shocked to see a 7 second clip come to almost 700mb as a raw file.
Indeed video will probably be the last kind of network to see federation. It could take some pretty generous acts of philanthropy along the way to make anything sustainable happen.
Yeah I did a music video in 4k on an A7s2 and the source files, for what ended up as a 4 minute video, were around 100GB.
100 GB ? that's cute. I work in a film production company for advertisements, where the recent trend has been for the crew to return after 3-5 days of shooting, with RAIDs filled with somewhere between 15 and 25 TB of raw data. no fun to store all this.
I mean, that's an extreme example. That's way above what on even a 4K BR disc.
I think Netflix is like 6GB for a two hour movie 1080p which is more manageable, but my connection (at a whopping 6Mbps upload) would just about be able to host that for one other person to see.
Modern connections can do a lot, but it would have to be a large peer to peer solution to be back in the hands of the masses. A couple of Linux nerds with a spare server under their desk isn't going to cut it. Realistically, popular videos would have to be on a CDN of some sort, and that ain't particularly cheap at scale.
Freedom isn't free, as the song goes.
I'd happily pay for a federated video service tbh. I already pay for YouTube. I didn't even blink when they raised the price on me because I get so much value out of it
It's simple: don't do 4K. It's absolutely unneeded.
I've never seen any big media content that actually benefits from more than 720p. Among other things, for watching comfortably on laptops. Heck, for most communication / reaction videos, 540p / 480p is more than enough (in those cases the audio is actually more important than the visuals).
I watch a lot of music videos though so I love 4k. Don't know why you're getting down voted though. What you said is true. I don't need to watch a talk stream vod in 4k
Thanks. And it's understandable, I'm guessing most of the people downvoting are the ones who are trying to defend their sunk cost after having bought into a solution without a problem.
That said, there do are valid use cases for stuff like 1080p or 4K (or for, say, >= 120 fps). I just don't think modern "big corp" media, or TV shows, are good examples of it. Like, honestly, what do you want to watch Avengers: Endgame in 4K for? To salivate at the warts on The Hulk's groin?
You're right on that too. Those movies actually look worse in 4k because low resolutions hide the bad CGI.
I have a large collection of 4k blurays for my favorite movies though. Like Blade Runner 2049 and Dune look fantastic. But not every movie deserves the hard disk space.
And still, do you need a 4K video stream for a music video?
I understand wanting higher res audio (which still amounts to minuscule amounts of bandwith compared to the video stream) but I don't get how image quality is important in this setting.
Cannot agree more with this , most screens those are used at homes are good to go with 720p , or at least i fail to see a difference !
I've never seen any big media content that actually benefits from more than 720p.
Have you considered seeing an optometrist instead?
I wonder when they'll have to start deleting content to make space again. At some point, adding more and more servers probably won't be feasible anymore.
It really is just wild that a service like YouTube is as big as it is and just does its thing.
Currently data storage is dirt cheap because globalised mass production of electronics is a wild thing.
As soon as we get past our current peak everything production at least on copper, rare metals, and petrol (there's more, I'm just not knowledgeable enough) and we start to have to ration things a bit high res video streaming will be one of the first things to go.
And then comes the question, what will they delete first?
Probably old and therefore maybe irrelevant content, but those old videos from over a decade ago are also mostly lower resolution and bitrate and won't free up as much space.
So once that's exhausted, what goes next?
Who will have the privilege to stay on the platform, and who won't? Or in other words, who makes YouTube the most money?
And once that has to be decided, content will be whatever YouTube wants it to be. Which I can't imagine being a good thing.
My guess would be deleting higher res versions of less watched videos and unwatched videos alltogether.
Anyway archiving everything everyone does is - imho - a fool's errand.
Well, time to switch to watching Nebula?
I can't see how it will work for small-time creators though. Or for people who just want to show a video online.
I love nebula too. They're definitely what I imagine federated video would be though. Restricted uploads, and paid. Nothing wrong with that though, video is expensive.
Well, one question is how it'd be paid for. You can't really have a federated payment provider, can you?
So would you have to pay for each separate server somehow, gathering them up like streaming service subscriptions?
Someone smarter than me will need to figure that out. I'm a lowly software engineer, not a computer scientist.
Hey, doesn't mean you can't aspire to be a systems architect :D
You know, make enough decisions that weren't perfect in the long term and you'll learn something! ...totally not speaking from experience, no.
You can’t really have a federated payment provider, can you?
Not to sound like a crypto bro, but this is literally the biggest benefit of cryptocurrencies, easy transfer of money between people wallet to wallet, and you can choose your exchange to exchange the money between crypto and cash.
Unfortunately crypto bros absolutely ruined crypto for everything it could've been
I was actually thinking about what it would take to have a truly peer to peer video site. Have clients simultaneously consume, serve and transcode content. It would obviously be concentrated in the hands of big enthusiasts and small video companies, but presumably it would be similar to the fediverse where you can choose from many instances.
problem, the way I see it, is that there are wayyyyy more devices that cannot transcode and do not have the storage to maintain a cache, than ones that do. And the ones that can do so for a large number of clients are expensive to run. Much more expensive than stuff like lemmy. It'd be hard to form that kind of ecosystem.
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Is size really the issue though? I can torrent more than I can store on my hard drives.
Seems like you could build a video streaming service on that. (Actually I think some people already did this.)
Yeah it is an issue. I archive my 4k blurays and they chew through my hard drive space far faster than I can get new hard drives
Lbry does exactly this. Actually it works way better than the last time I checked it out. I'm guessing they have invested in a centralized storage solution because I'm encountering basically no missing videos and extremely fast playback which wasn't the case the last time I checked them out a few years ago
I think you can replace all social media with a decentralized version, except YouTube. Reason is cost and monetization.
Even if YouTube is questionable on privacy-YouTube have more of a product unlike social media where you are the product
I feel like it's still crazy that YouTube share their ad revenue with their content creators. Granted it's not much but not even tiktok, Instagram nor twitch does that.
Which description? That Wikipedia article says "The aim is to provide an alternative to centralized platforms such as YouTube, Vimeo, and Dailymotion."
The difference to YouTube is that it's not intended to create a huge platform centralizing videos from the whole world on a single server farm (which is horribly expensive).
From their website. It's a very different system, and also not funded by advertisers, which means someone else has to pay the bills.
Is PeerTube's purpose to replace YouTube?
We can answer with certainty: no!
The ambition remains to be a free and decentralized alternative: the goal of an alternative is not to replace, but to propose something else, with different values, in parallel to what already exists.
They're saying they're not a "replacement" because it's a decentralized alternative to something centralized. Not because it can't serve the same needs for technical or economic reasons.
It's like replacing Amazon for online shopping. Even a coalition of every competitor couldn't touch YouTube.
You don't need to replace Amazon in it's entirety. You just need to shop from different places selling only a particular category (clothes, books, computer hardware, pet supplies etc) or straight from brand's shop. At least that's what I've been doing. Also haven't renewed my prime subscription for last 2 years.
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All the power to those that like Amazon but I have never bought anything from Amazon and never will. I always look up the cheapest option (that is trustworthy) which Amazon never is. Plus I don't like their business model just like I don't like media mark (they killed of many stores by selling for huge losses for years). we want competition so we want as many stores as possible, we also want experts, so I rather go to a store that sells x type of products not x, y, z and also b like Amazon do.
Also big stores like Amazon only makes sense in the physical form, jumping between stores online isn't physical draining.
It's probably easier to replace Amazon than YouTube. Free streaming services don't make money, YouTube loses money, Twitch loses money, Kick loses money, the Microsoft one before it died was losing money. If it's free to watch it loses money, and these are companies that do a ton of work to try and make it not lose money, and it just doesn't work.
None of these websites are dead, and youtube isn't going anywhere. You can't just host Zetabytes of video data on a home server.
Just call up Linustechtips and ask to collab on a zetabyte project. Probably get the storage drives for free, right?
/s
I bought a 3 ZB drive from wish com. It's going pretty good, I'm during the only copy of my entire family's home videos and pictures on it.
Exactly. Youtube is there to stay, i think. I dont have many issues with it as well tbh. I pay for our family account and its just an amazing experience, no need for Spotify with YT Music as well. Creators earn more with premium too - the service is just working for me.
One could debate about hosting costs and revenue split and content policies, but in principle, i have no qualms with Youtube.
YouTube probably isn't worried about open source competition, but Twitch could be a real competitor. Twitch already captured a large chunk of gaming, especially the live streams.
Twitch could have massively ate into YouTube if they wanted, but they must have decided it wasn't worth the cost to host videos.
Twitch would need a lot of work to make videos more first class citizens, that is probably more the reason than storage costs. They have Amazon backing them now with basically unlimited storage potential.
Honestly the only subscription I don’t mind paying for. You can’t beat ad free YouTube videos.
You can also seamlessly download videos on all of your devices, on top of their own music streaming service.
I’m sure you can get all of it for free somehow, but there’s a point in life that convenience is more important. Also, the family plan is dirt cheap if you consider all you get.
Yeah paid YT is probably the last media subscription to go, especially with YT Music. Hours and hours of watch time probably number one thing watched by the whole family. The only problem I usually have with YT is getting "boxed in" to content, like it thinks I only like watching channel X now because I watched a video. Sometimes the entire feed is like 2 or 3 channels and it's harder to discover something new.
(One interesting thing, if you create your own YT channels each channel has a fresh watch history and sometimes you can then build up a different set of videos on the other channels)
- patreon
- most people make literal pennies off of youtube, so it wouldn't be much for them to switch
There is money to be made, just not off ads. Instagram has content without paying people. It just depends on how the creator is financing themselves. Paid sponsorships? Is it in support of something else (Patreon, web store, etc)? There is no money to be made off ads and I support that. But there is money to be made, but you need a following for it to be worthwhile. It'd be interesting if someone created an app that allows dual posting to YouTube and PeerTube, or posting to PixelFed & Instagram at the same time. Once they start getting followers on those other platforms, there are less intrusive methods to monetize it.
Yeah, till we have paid subscriptions or very well targeted good reputation advertising, there won't be enough money to switch over.
Mastadon, Searx, Fediverse, and so on aren't killing or replacing the sites they're modeled after, not even close. They're just providing a privacy focused alternative for those who don't want to whored out by corporations or abused by powermods or shitty business decisions
To replace YouTube, the decentralization platform https://odysee.com does a great job
Big channels like Veritasium have been migrating slowly
Lol really? Someone just tooted that as internets savior. Only a company like Google can run something like YouTube. The structure behind it is insane.
No, im watching a video on their platform now. LBRY and Odysee are the same thing. i still use the LBRY app though
Not exactly same, content related with terrorism etc are not being showed on odyssey; even though the things odysee are reasonable to ban, I still recommend using lbry
The company, not the blockchain. I wish we see support from the community. I have also a channel there (TuxHouse).
The company? Sure they went bankrupt but I'm not sure what that has to do with Odysee - which is a separate entity
Lbry and Odyssee are the same. Odysee was the new facade for LBRY content using their blockchain tech.
Odysee is a blockchain-based media platform.
Ah hell no! I'm not even going to touch that with a 10ft pole.
All of these platforms are still used by many. As a someone who left Reddit for Lemmy I gotta say a lot of these people have a heavy dose of copium saying Reddit is dead just because they'd like it to be.
When I think of it as dead I think of it the same way as Facebook. Sure it's still there but the vibe is thoroughly dead. They're where people get comfy and retire to stay stuck in their ways while others move on to greener pastures.
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Yes I pop in every now and then and reddit still has tons of activity. The communities I follow here are way more active on reddit still.
These platflorms are all declining. Facebook has been for years. This path leads to certain death. There is no way for them to recover from their past mistakes. So it's equivalent to being already dead for me
The "dead" platforms still exist it just that they've undergone unacceptable amounts of corporate enshitification.
I like to think of them as retirement homes. Boomers retired on Facebook. The next gen of boomers will now retire on Reddit. I hope I never retire anywhere I want to try all the new things forever :(
Super shilly comment incoming, but YouTube Premium is maybe the only subscription I pay for (other than Game Pass) that I think is worthwhile. I was also blown away by how much I like YouTube Music. Don’t get me wrong, I’m fully anticipating the platform to race to the bottom and go to complete and utter shit, but for the time being, I think it’s solid.
You can also not pay for it and get it with ReVanced.
ReVanced also auto skips ad reads in the video itself
Except premium pays the people that make the content. ReVanced is, regardless of if you hate big tech, blatantly stealing the work of the skilled artists you enjoy.
For really old Chromecasts: https://github.com/chromecast-sponsorblock/chromecast-sponsorblock
For the newer Chromecasts that just run Android TV: https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTubeNext
RIP Play Music.
But yeah, Drive and YT bundles are basically the one thing I'll still pay for, and it ends up including YT Music which isn't bad.
I have to agree with this one. I got premium way back in 2015 when it first came out as youtube red, my reasoning at the time was since it came with Play Music, no ads on youtube videos, and at the time cost the same as a spotify subscription, I could have the same music library I was already paying for PLUS youtube without ads every 10 seconds and access to youtube red exclusive content, Mindfield by Vsauce and the Rooster Teeth movies at the time, I was getting more for the same 10 bucks. I was sad to see play music go but youtube music letting me add songs to my playlists from videos on youtube if the song itself isn't directly in the streaming service is pretty cool and I've been grandfathered into the same price, so I still pay the same $10/mo now that I did 8 years ago. Only subscription I'll ever actually tell anyone is worth getting over just using an adblocker instead.
Video is literally the data elephant in the room. I think we'll need AI to assist in developing something that demanding in terms of bandwidth. Remember, Youtube just works. No one is going to move to a platform where a video takes 30-60 seconds to load a video and a half an hour to upload a video when a practically instant option exists.
And I may be in the minority here, but so far, Google has been the least nefarious tech giant to my eyes. They haven't given me adequate reason to disavow them. I'm not saying they're good, I'm just saying they're not Musk Twitter, Zuck Meta, or the like. They don't obfuscate the fact that they sell your data like Meta, and they even understand the value of open source software, rare for a publically traded capitalist corporation. This will probably change, greed rot is universal, and they do treat their creators like dogshit on YouTube. But I'd be shocked if it was reasonably replacable by distributed enthusiasts given current infrastructure and bandwidth pricing. Estimates have Youtube's video data to be around 300 Petabytes, or 300,000 terabytes.
Oh wow. I had no idea Freenet was going in this direction. Like IPFS, but better.
How is it better? The big issue with IPFS is fast content discovery. How does Locutus do here? Freenet used to be a resouce hog and dog slow.
The last paragraph is what got to me. Being able to host decentralized services, like messaging, social media, etc.
Really? I'd say Apple is the least nefarious. They sell products to customers, they do not sell customers' attention.
Depends what you value I guess, Apple has set so many terrible precedents for closed systems and walled-gardens.
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You’re not wrong, but those same walled gardens keep corporations OUT as much as they keep you IN.
If you like your gardener, no big deal. But if you want azaleas and the gardener prefers daisies, ur out of luck.
Least nefarious ≠ good. Alphabet is still a publicly traded corporation at heart, and they have a legal obligation to their shareholders to turn a profit by any means necessary.
Don't forget that they got rid of their "Don't be Evil" motto.
It's weird that Evil Corporation whose critique is still valid is just not as shitty or simply flies under radar by modern standards. YouTube's pipeline into conspiracies and demonitization are likely the last I've heard of them in negative light, and that's just a tip of an iceberg. That's like you can be evil without being cringe.
300 Petabytes is nothing. The Filecoin network alone has 20 EiB available. There must be more data than that on Youtube
Edit: Maybe there isn't, but that would render the problem very easy
I would love a decentralized TikTok replacement. Aside from everybody's privacy complaints, TikTok has a really addictive delivery model.
I would think that short video clips would be easier to federate than beefy 4k video files.
The problem with YouTube is that people make real money off of their content, in an honest way. Unless you can match or exceed that level of income, you don't have much of a chance of competing. People's livelihoods would be at stake
Reddit was big, but not profitable for users. At most, it was a social boost and marketing. That's easily replaceable. Real, significant profiting, not so much.
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I REALLY want there to be a better YT replacement on the fediverse or in some form of decentralized way.
As people are pointing out, videos are very large files, and therefore very expensive to host. The fediverse can mitigate this a little bit, as everyone can host their own videos on their own server, but that's not enough, and extremely inconvenient.
I do wonder if the blockchain/torrents can be used here... I'm not a dev or anything so IDK how any of it really works, but I think something to that tune is gonna be the only way, since traditional servers don't seem to be viable.
I do wonder if the blockchain ... can be used here
In what way? To what effect? It's not like blockchain magically makes videos small.
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I did say I don't really know how it works😅... But here's what I was thinking:
My limited understanding is that the blockchain works as a ledger. Basically, a list that can verify or confirm the authenticity and provenance of files. The way it's verified is by doing some very complicated math on some particular numbers with properties that allow for their authenticity to be verified but not forged. People have incentives to do this complicated math (that takes up power, time, money, etc.) because the blockchain rewards them with tokens or coins (which could be used to pay for special services on the platform, for example).
So, yes, the blockchain doesn't make files smaller, but it could work to verify their authenticity, and that they have not been tampered with. That way, anyone can host anyone's videos, but the ledger would guarantee that the video is the "original", as well as information about who first posted it, etc...
So instead of videos being hosted on 1 server, videos could be downloaded and made available by anyone to anyone at any time. The videos aren't smaller, but no 1 server would have more burden than any other, and it would be scalable since the users would host their favourite videos. Like torrenting?
Maybe it's not a useful tool in this case, IDK. It was just an ignorant suggestion really, as I said I'm not a dev and don't actually understand any of this... I just want a better YT.
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So, yes, the blockchain doesn’t make files smaller, but it could work to verify their authenticity, and that they have not been tampered with.
As with every other suggested use of blockchain, there are already better ways to verify contents. It's called hashing, it's been around for decades, and we do it all the time.
So instead of videos being hosted on 1 server, videos could be downloaded and made available by anyone to anyone at any time.
This is going to run into all kinds of bottlenecks. Individual users may have a fast enough Internet connection to stream HD video, but uploading is often much slower. Even if not, one user could only co-host maybe 1-2 other users. Also, ISPs sure aren't going to like all the increased bandwidth!
People always vastly underestimate the bandwidth requirements for smooth, streaming video.
The fediverse can mitigate this a little bit, as everyone can host their own videos on their own server, but that’s not enough, and extremely inconvenient.
and still expensive as hell. Hopefully one of your videos doesn't go slightly viral, or you'll get a pretty huge bill from your VPS. Unless you own the infrastructure, you're paying a huge penny to host video.
Linus from LTT talked about it when it comes to FloatPlane. How stupidly expensive it is to host video.
You are right about torrents. Blockchains could be useful, but indirectly. For instance, Filecoin is a marketplace for decentralized storage. You can pay 1$ per TB per year, and the amount of storage can scale almost to infinity because as demand increase, price increase, and offer increase
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The fediverse can mitigate this a little bit, as everyone can host their own videos on their own server, but that’s not enough, and extremely inconvenient.
Better than nothing for sure though.
So for twitter it's mastodon, for reddit it's lemmy, for youtube odysee maybe, but what is it for facebook?
but what is it for facebook?
I volunteer my trash can for Facebook, should do a decent job and it already has the smell to match, so we don't need to waste time implementing that feature
cool, can you dockerize that please, so I can host an instance of "simple@lemmy.mywire.xyz's trashcan"?
Mastodon -> Twitter
Friendica -> Facebook
Pixelfed -> Instagram
Lemmy/kbin -> Reddit
PeerTube -> Youtube
Owncast -> Twitch
FunkWhale/Castopod -> Music/Podcast
BookWyrm -> Goodreads
WriteFreely -> Blog
Yes and the best thing is the federation with all of these platforms. So you can follow a PeerTube or Owncast channel and receive a notification if a video is uploaded or a stream is starting.
This is the Owncast main directory link: https://directory.owncast.online/
Friendica, as others have said. Mobilizon looks good for less of the family-and-friends aspect of the platform.
Odysee/LBRY is just another bit of crypto crap. Another desperate attempt to create an off-ramp for people who have invested in digital trash actually cash out, by bringing in a fresh wave of lesser fools. PeerTube is the fediverse equivalent to YouTube.
Odysee/LBRY is just another bit of crypto crap.
That, and while it was kinda nice in the beginning with a bunch of Linux / Tech / Science creators and a friendly community, it quickly became dominated by bigotry and conspiracy theories.
I thought Friedica and Diaspora are similar to the core Facebook stuff. But I have never used them
Reddit also has Kbin which is cross compatible with Lemmy as well. YouTube has PeerTube also. Facebook has Friendica, Diaspora, and Hubzilla. The issue with Facebook is that its much more dependent on specific users. You either want friends or companies from my experiences. So without either of those, there's a lot less to do. Random feeds of strangers make more sense on the other platforms.