YouTube might be the biggest challenge yet given the extraordinary amount of storage needed to recreate it.
This, also all (well, many) of the creators do it to make money.
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.
Because what’s the point otherwise. Let’s just make a YouTube without videos. That will surely work.
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
Yeah the majority are 30 I think
The fediverse doesn’t make money and it shouldn’t. YouTube is fine unless some other business makes a decent competitor.
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.
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.
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.
Ad reads and patreon
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.
good. i don’t want capitalist advertising bs on the internet anyway.
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
Young up and coomers
I don’t think that word means what you think it means
Peertube works well so far, I use this instance which specialises in hosting music creative stuff https://rankett.net/w/nqE8nNjbau7Q5UuDFCMT9z
Where does the storage for torrents come from?
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.
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.
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.
Not to mention the computing to re-encode stuff for different framerates and resolution
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
What show?
Silicon Valley
Not worth watching past season 4, imo. Season 2 is the peak season, if you ask me.
Every season just felt like a repeat of season 1 IMO.
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.
I wonder if IPFS could have a part in this? We’ll find a solution.
IPFS has been very slow in my experience. Wonder if that could be improved.
I think the more peers there are the faster it is.
PEERTUBE CELEBRITIES
How do I downvote this?
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.
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.
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.
Peertube
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Hmmm :// that really sucks honestly…
yeah some system like a torrent could solve this issue
So for twitter it’s mastodon, for reddit it’s lemmy, for youtube odysee maybe, but what is it for facebook?
TruthSocial 😆
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.
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.
Mastodon -> Twitter
Friendica -> Facebook
Pixelfed -> Instagram
Lemmy/kbin -> Reddit
PeerTube -> Youtube
Owncast -> Twitch
FunkWhale/Castopod -> Music/Podcast
BookWyrm -> Goodreads
WriteFreely -> Blog
Discord -> Matrix
Revolt first, after Matrix but yes.
Wow, even Twitch? That’s nice. Now all I need is an alternative to IMDB and I’m set.
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/
Now if we could somehow get LinkedIn. It will be the last core of evil pro corporatism.
linkedin wont change cause employers love it
I have not heard of odyssey and google isn’t giving good results. Can you link it?
Its Odysee, my bad
Thanks!
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”?
For YouTube it’s PeerTube and for Twitch it’s probably OwnCast
I thought Friedica and Diaspora are similar to the core Facebook stuff. But I have never used them
I use friendica
You could also use Hubzilla
I guess something like pixelfed or diaspora
Pixelfed is more Instagram.
Facebook? New for me
There’s an alternative to YouTube? There’s a defederated Facebook?
PeerTube, Diaspora.
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
This response isn’t meant to be argumentative, I’m just learning:
Isn’t the fredieverse have the issue of being not very private at all? Aren’t our up votes public? Is our viewing history freely available to those that maintain an instance?
They’re private in the sense that there isn’t a corporation stealing your data without your knowledge, selling it without your consent, whoring you out for ads against your will, and/or making your experience shittier to manipulate you into buying their paid features. These alternatives offer a much more pure experience for the typical user. Things like comment and vote history being public is just a part of the design of the forum, they’re not tools to farm your data.
Is that true though? Any given instance could be running their own data collection.
They could, but they’re pretty much guaranteed to not be as bad as the big corporations because they lack the resources and know how. The fact that you could also host your own instance is a huge plus considering that you could basically ensure that your data won’t get collected.
A corporation can still be “stealing” your data without your knowledge if info is public, it’s called Scraping
No one said they are killing or replacing them , I moved to fediverse becuase the govt cant bully them into censoring certain content that was being removed from major SMs in my country
What replaced Facebook?
Not using Facebook.
Try WireMin, someone recommended it from another post. Its a decentralized version of FB, people described it as combination of Mastodon + Session.
- E2EE messaging
- Feed for blog post
Decentralized network, So no central server to collect user data, and they can’t implement any restriction rules, so 0 banning and censorship
“Free speech: no cancelling”
Doesnt seem appealing to me…I know there’s nothing wrong with those things, but the kind of people using the word “cancelling” and “free speech” are the kinds I try not to associate with
No money to make on the fediverse => no (expensive to create) content.
- patreon
- most people make literal pennies off of youtube, so it wouldn’t be much for them to switch
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.
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)
Honestly the only subscription I don’t mind paying for. You can’t beat ad free YouTube videos.
Yeah definitely but why pay for that?
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.
uBlock Origin + SponsorBlock
Peertube already exist. If you have to upload a video to show someone on the internet it’s already more convenient than youtube as you don’t have to login and access with google accounts.
you can use youtube without a google account?
I don’t think so. Creating accounts on Peertube is much easier as it’s decentralized, some instances won’t care about your data such telephone number
You can. You can’t subscribe or use it ad free but I have no issues going to YouTube and just searching for what I need. No account required.
You can’t subscribe or use it ad free
Yes, I should have said you can’t subscribe or watch add free without 3rd party software like adblockers and software like newpipe.
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.
I feel like addictive algorithms are a big part of what we need to get away from.
There is one called Goldfish Social
Have you used it? Seems like it’s not a total replacement for TikTok.
In the case of a decentralized youtube, who would be responsible for the data storage?
Each instance, as with the rest of the fediverse. It already exists, btw. Look up Peertube if you’re curious.
I didn’t know about this, thanks for the heads up!! But, with this decentralized approach, if a peertube node “dies”, could those videos be saved in a different node? I guess one of my biggest concerns with the fediverse is that fragmenting the network might also lead to fragility of content
Nope. If there’s nobody to rip out physical storage and move it, it’s gone.
Oof, that might be a solid roadblock limiting peertube/fediverse. Decentralization sounds great as a greediness deterrence system, but it also feels like lesser nodes will be more prone to stop maintenance over many years, making decentralize content more fragile than centralized. I wonder if a way to counterattack this is via enabling posts mirroring and content transfer among fediverse instances… 🤔
Otoh do we need perfect (or even good) persistence for the 36284th similar bbq tuto or some random-ass cat video?
I get that point! But imagine “ancient youtube history videos” like “chocolate rain” were hosted on an old and unstable peertube node. I would find it sad that a decentralized infrastructure erased old and historic eras of the internet. I’m not saying this just defeats the whole fediverse, I just find it a point of concern, I’m sure if it is really a problem the developers and community will find approaches to mitigate it!
(Btw, I’m not yet well informed about all the caveats/tradeoffs/unwritten rules of lemmy/mastodon/peertube when it comes to data storage, so maybe what I’m saying just doesn’t make sense at all, correct me if I’m wrong!!)
My bet is that if a video is famous it’s gonna get replicated. And if it doesn’t, well, it will join the unending list of lost medias.
Anyway we just can’t archive anything anyone produces forever.
Peertube is not a replacement for YouTube, per the official website.
Youtube as others noted isnt as evil as reddit or others, but peertube could be a good augmentation to youtube which stores loads of data. However Internet Archive stores alot of data as does Wikipedia don’t know how though. You could also pay per video, one cent per video no subscription just own what you buy. Or you could find way of compressing video data consumption files like is done with png and obsidian files. Or merge ads with content but with a marketplace anyone who wants to sale a product can post to specilized instants for sales and only those who want to buy would be subscribed to for profit instances.
I think ads need to be the way to go for a peer video sharing platform , maybe less intrusive ads but they need to be there , else it will be very hard for many creators to make money
So if every instance helps stream videos to a single client via a torrent protocol, that still means every instance needs to individually store all videos for all the servers it federates with. Sounds like it solves bandwidth as an issue but storage is still absolutely a problem.