So Elon gutted Twitter, and people jumped ship to Mastodon. Now spez did… you know… and we’re on Lemmy and Kbin. Can we have a YouTube to PeerTube exodus next? With the whole ad-pocalypse over there, seems like Google is itching for it.
YouTube is one of the only groups that actually makes a profit…or at least gets close to making one - the metric seems to change with the economy.
Also it has a monetization model, which makes it infinitely more enticing than an instance that’s more likely to cost money.
Finally the cost of storing and serving video is exponentially higher than images gifs and text, making it more prohibitedly expensive the more users you have.
Sure you could have a pretty ok system if they added a built in patreon like mechanism to peertube, with a revenue split. But it remains to be seen if creators and people are willing to negotiate and give up enough revenue in order to keep the server alive. And also it becomes a bit more businesslike - as you’ve seen with twitch, giving a worse split is bound to cause backlash and people to drop your instance, even if it’s necessary to break even.
There’s next to no chance you’ll have an easy time if you wanted to migrate your account to another instance - especially if you wanted to keep all your videos. You’d probably have to re-upload them all as most migration setups on the fediverse don’t move post data due to the prohibitive amount of data there is, more so for pictures and video
I think we’d be more likely to see pixelfed replace Instagram and pixiv than peertube replace YouTube.
I’m afraid the barrier to entry for this is much higher, as video streaming is quite expensive. You need a lot of storage and also a lot of traffic.
It seems like PeerTube does allow peer to peer streaming of watched videos too, so that might help mitigate the bandwidth requirements. The storage and transcoding requirements will be far larger than things like Lemmy though, agreed.
I’d expect p2p streaming to soften the blow for the traffic bill generated by popular videos. You’d always need somebody else to consume the content at the same time which doesn’t happen in most cases.
If you’re taking a similar route to YouTube, you also need a ton of CPU/GPU power and/or specialized hardware. YouTube transcodes every video into 2 (3 for videos with >~2M views) different formats in 5 different resolutions. A community-run service could skip on some of that, but it’d come at the cost of lower quality, less support for older devices, or higher bandwidth usage.
I see potential in a site that offers an alternative algorithm, or curated list of channels, but still links to youtube for the streaming itself. The content that Youtube shows me has gotten quite bad lately… and the search doesn’t even work properly.
Yeah, good point. The others are mainly hosting text and some images
Speaking of, got any good peertube channels? Tbh, I’m more familiar with nebula and floatplane - where YT creators made their own platform. Maybe that’s where things are headed
Nebula is not bad. I paid for it for a year, but had some issues with not enough content and the buggy UI on Firefox. If Youtube blocks adblockers, I’ll certainly go back to it.
Well Google is gutting ad blockers. So maybe there will be an extremely minor exodus yet.
as disgusting as it feels, I think paying for Youtube Premium is a pretty good deal. You get no ads, and creators get much, much more money per view. I’m not sure what it is for videos, but with Youtube Music, by band gets literally ten times as much per listen from as Premium subscriber than an “ad supported” one. Given the sheer amount of otherwise free high quality material on the platform, the tiny amount they ask each month for it is pretty decent. IMO, YMMV, IANAL, consult your doctor before taking, etc
Got YT Premium for my family the past few years, it’s been great NGL. It probably gets more use than any other streaming service, and would probably be the last paid service i gave up for video.
Because of the increased revenue to creators I don’t feel so bad about installing sponsorblock to skip in-video ads
Fair point. I watch a lot of YT and block ads (though it sounds like they’re finally cracking down on that). I support some creators on Nebula and Patreon, but I guess YT Premium is basically like those.
Me and my partner pay jointly for Premium and I wouldn’t want to go back. No ads on any device we watch on, knowing that the creators get a good chunk of change from it, is bliss.
On PC, this only really affects you if you’re still using Google Chrome. Firefox isn’t quite as nice as Chrome (don’t @ me, it’s the truth) but it is serviceable and uBlock Origin deals with 99% of ads just fine.
The main thing here is that twitter and Reddit dont pay their popular users (massively followed accounts i mean), but YouTube does. As long as PeerTube won’t have a business model, and they never will because that’s not what it was created for, i dont think there will be any migration
Don’t most youtubers get their money from in video sponsorships these days?
Yeah, because sponsors are confident enough to trust a youtube-based audience. Good luck for PeerTubers to get sponsorships
These days it isn’t just a YouTube based audience. It’s YouTube and tiktok and Instagram etc etc. Sure exclusive peertubers won’t get sponsorships, but they don’t need to be exclusive, at first at least. peertube currently wouldn’t even factor in, but if it were to take off even moderately it could start to be part of the conversation.
Every youtuber I follow has some contiginency for when the YouTube algorithm turns against them. Patreon, nebula, floatplane, podcasts the list goes on and on.
The problem really is on the hosting side imo and I don’t think activitypub solves it the way it does for text based content.
This.
YouTube and Twitch are in this same boat. The video format is a hugely lucrative one. Many people consume it passively, either in the background or while doing other things. The ad exposure is huge, and there’s a ton of value in having people invested in your platform, so financial incentives are high.
There just aren’t enough people who are willing or able to put that much effort into making rich content for free, especia6when there’s a payed alternative
Doubt it, it’s expensive to host and creators won’t have ways to ways to monetize it as easily as YouTube.
Also, I wouldn’t really call the Twitter and Reddit cases “exodus”. As much as I would like to see the fediverse succeed, the number of users on mastodon and Lemmy are just a blip on the radar.
I still see the same links on my Lemmy frontage days after they have been submitted, it’s far less active than Reddit.
I still see the same links on my Lemmy frontage days after they have been submitted, it’s far less active than Reddit.
Use sort by Top -> Day. The algorithm for that one is working.
The lemmy front page default sort is currently broken IIRC. try sorting by new comments.
I tried sorting by “New”, and while that does show me new content, it won’t show me new content that the community thinks it’s good (that’s the whole point about having a voting system).
I’ve changed from the default (i.e. “Active”) into “Hot”, but the frontpage is still very stale.
One reddit feature I do miss is the ability to automatically hide posts that you already upvoted or downvoted. That would keep my frontpage relatively fresh.
The good thing about Lemmy is that it’s open source. Community requests are easy to make and will be discussed. Creating third party apps should not be an issue either.
The bad thing about Lemmy, on the other hand, is that it’s open source. There’s no VC funding to hire hundreds of overpaid developers to fix things quickly, so we just have to be a bit patient and give the devs time to make the necessary changes.
Yes, I’m fully aware of that, and I’m OK with waiting. I’ve been favouring the use of open-source software for a long time, and that’s not about to change.
Just pointing out some areas that could potentially have a large ROI when it comes to the devs’ time.
I hate this notion that a platform isn’t successful unless it has a billion users. As long as there’s a critical mass of people, it’s fine. One thing I’ve realised browsing lemmy for the past week is just how much of my Reddit experience was defined by the same handful of Twitter screenshots and rehosted tiktoks being reposted over and over again like every week.
I hate this notion that a platform isn’t successful unless it has a billion users. As long as there’s a critical mass of people, it’s fine. One thing I’ve realised browsing lemmy for the past week is just how much of my Reddit experience was defined by the same handful of Twitter screenshots and rehosted tiktoks being reposted over and over again like every week.
I agree, I just don’t think lemmy is at critical mass yet.
Maybe it’s just me, but it feels like most of the discussion is still centered around how bad reddit has become. Only after reddit stops living rent free inside people’s heads, will lemmy be able to develop its own culture, IMO.
I don’t disagree, but it’s been less than a month. The story is actively unfolding, and it is a big deal for people who spent a lot of time there. I give it maybe one more month, during which time the API is getting killed and all the 3PAs will shut down, after that, there won’t really be much new to say. People are going to keep finding their way to the fediverse, and they’re going to want to talk about how much it sucks that Reddit killed Reddit. But give that a few weeks and they’ll get tired of that and just want to talk about actual stuff. And the communities will be here.
Heck, they may be small but I’ve already been able to get questions answered about some topics of interest just by posting on a relevant board and waiting a day.
I still see the same links on my Lemmy frontage days after they have been submitted, it’s far less active than Reddit.
That problem stopped the instant I switched to Kbin. There is a ton of activity happening that you are missing.
Are there any plans to federate instances across both platforms? (i.e. allow for subscriptions)
Or has this been implemented, and I just missed it?
EDIT: Nevermind, found it. It is possible.
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Honestly, people generally have more compute power than they need. If this proverbial platform came with an efficient transcoder, then the files just need to be hosted.
The torrenting scene is alive and well with users fronting the cost and taking legal risks. Many torrents have enough speed to actually stream the content while it’s downloading. Hard to say now… But if somebody set up a solid peer-to-peer solution, I think it has a chance.The other thing to keep in mind is that youtube (and twitch, and shudders quora), with all its problems, does share revenue with creators on the platform, instead of treating them as free labor.
I would love to see it, but I dont think we are there yet. No impetus to switch combined with much more expensive tech. I would also antipate dmca to turn the whole thing into a mess. But one day we’ll get there hopefully.
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Hosting and bandwidth for videos has a big cost.
Plus it’s computationally expensive. YouTube has entire data centers filled with servers using custom silicon to encode ingested videos into nearly every resolution/framerate and codec they serve, so that different clients get the most efficient option for their quality settings and supported codecs, no matter what the original uploader happened to upload. Granted, that workflow mainly makes sense because of bandwidth costs, but the high quality of the user experience depends on that backend.
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As I understand it, it ingests an uploaded video and automatically encodes it in a bunch of different quality settings in h.264, then, if the video is popular enough to justify the computational cost of encoding into AV1 and VP9, they’ll do that when the video reaches something like 1000 views. And yes, once encoded they just keep the copies so that it doesn’t have to be done again.
Here’s a 2-year-old blog post where YouTube describes some of the technical challenges.
As that blog post explains, when you’re running a service that ingests 500 hours of user submitted video every minute, you’ll need to handle that task differently than how, for example, Netflix does (with way more video minutes being served, but a comparatively tiny amount of original video content to encode, where bandwidth efficiency becomes far more important than encoding computational efficiency).
Youtube is the only truly great social media platform left. It pains me to say it, but the bar is quite low! It pays creators better than its rivals and its premium subscription is generally considered good value. Remember - it’s both users and creators that need to migrate.
Really, there cannot be an alternative until there’s one that can afford to pay content creators the same or more than YouTube can. No content, no platform.
It also needs to be able to distribute the cost for hosting insane amounts of video data, which is notoriously expensive. A single instance could bankrupt a person if it got hit with a large influx of users. Some lemmy instances has to brace for a rough ride as Reddit refugees jumped ship, and YouTube has a lot more users than Reddit. Even a tiny migration could be hell to deal with.
There will also need to be a purge of extremist content from any platform that wants to invite a migration. If all you have is weirdos evangelising dodgy cryptocoins and conspiracy theorists complaining about being booted off YouTube, nobody will want to go.
Peertube just isn’t the platform for this to happen. At least not yet.
I only disagree with one thing on that: youtube is not a social media platform. It is horrible for discussions, topic discovery and organization, the comment sections and chat are worse than 4chan. It is a video diffusion platform, but not truly social media.
Which is sad, because it used to be a much more social platform. I used to run a small channel in 2007 and I’d get people messaging me, or adding me to friends (yes, that was a thing on YouTube).
Nothing can really be worse than 4chan. Youtube users are primed to say genuinely stupid things and enjoy reinforcing ignorance, while 4chan users have always had the primary goal of causing as much harm and destruction as possible including but not limited to suicides, poisonings, and proliferation of genocidal ideologies.
Ok, when I said worse, it was from this point of view: in some subchans, I’ve seen some smart conversations and advice there among the 95% neverending jungle of slurs (they probably see that as a feature, not a bug). In yt: never, the medium simply doesn’t work to make people talk.
Well at least the hosting is cleverly helped by having the videos be shared by every user watching it at the same time. So viral videos are a lot less likely to take the platform down. But even though thats most of the bandwith cost its not all.
“and its premium subscription is generally considered good value”
That’s funny. You must live in a different world than I do.
Not going to happen. All the alternatives so far are attracting all the nutjobs and platform ends up with loth of garbage conspiracy videos, antisemitic, racist…etc users who would be otherwise straight banned from youtube.
The sword of free speech cuts both ways. You think they are “nutjobs” but you do not have the right to tell others not to listen to them. You are fully within your rights to not associate with them or their content. They may think your side are the “nutjobs” but they dont have the right to silence you either. Therefore anyone can post anything they want and it is up to the individual to decide what content they will consume and which content they will not associate with.
That’s unlikely. Both Reddit and Twitter speak or at least spoke to people who enjoy a certain image of being anti establishment (in one way or another and whether that’s warranted or not). Youtube just doesn’t. You can’t get more mainstream than Youtube.
Yes and no. We had TV before YouTube. And yet people still wanted YouTube. Now, YouTube is going full circle and turning into TV. At the end of the day, people just want a place where they can share some cat videos, and random funny clips and memes without all the monetisation, adds, regulation, political correctness, and sanitization. It’s just too out of touch for a lot of people.
I’m not sure if the next tube platform will have p2p or federation, but I do know that business models that don’t make the user the client always end up dieing from enshitification. People just get fed up of it. It’s just a matter of when, not if.
Youtubers and streamers are different as they create content for getting paid by those services. Peer to peer video content cant replace youtube as it is without government level universal income basically. Most dont make enough from patreon or w/e to survive
Youtubers generally make more from sponsorships than adsense, at least from what I’ve gathered. The reason to still run adsense even though it might annoy your audience is that if you don’t you get penalised by the algorithm.
Where I could easily see peertube taking off is with public broadcasters and generally media companies doing video that’s free to view, as far as youtubers is concerned I wouldn’t be surprised if e.g. nebula started to federate… they can still have a “paying customer vs. free content” type of separation while probably saving on bandwidth costs.
A big thing would be the likes of vimeo seeing this as an opportunity. Unless you’re already running such a platform you probably don’t want to get into the business of contentid and copyright strikes and would restrict your platform to well-known and/or paying actors, or, well, yourself.
Technically with a big enough audience a creator could support themselves with sponsorships. But YouTube still wins because it’s sponsorships+AdSense
I think at most you’d see people cross posting videos there as a secondary platform
That is precisely why I run my own instance, it’s essentially a backup from YouTube of my own dumb videos: https://peertube.bloonface.com
But honestly that’s pretty much all it is. It’s not really worth much more than that to me.
If you think an ad-pocalypse is bad, then why would they jump to a platform with no ads at all? They’d likely be paying to be on that platform. Also the fact streaming video from a self hosting platform is much more demanding then text fedi instances like Lemmy or Mastodon. Also no way the fedi could keep up with even a fraction of YouTube’s creator tools, or their audience which is their bottom line.
YouTube will probably never be replaced. We can at least go for private front ends like Invidious.
https://tutanota.com/blog/google-youtube-invidious-privacy-alternative
Google is probably going to kill private front ends rather sooner than later. First signs are already there.
Except they can’t - invidious uses the same front end APIs as the YouTube website. It probably also does web scraping.
Sure it’s a violation of TOS(frontend TOS - not API TOS) but because it latches on to publicly available parts of the YouTube system (in a similar way to yt-dlp) it’s essentially got a free pass - you can’t stop people from using freely accessible parts however they want. As a result it’s not able to use the accounts system (or at least, it shouldn’t be.
Yt doesn’t really have a leg to stand on… it might not stop them from trying to sue. But in the very least it won’t stop people from forking the invidious code and building their own in a sort of striesand effect. Even if the original product dies, invidious as a whole won’t, and can’t die.
I wouldn’t for the reasons mentioned by others.
There’s no monetization; I would have to find, attract, and deal with sponsors on my own.
There’s not really much in the way of audience which makes the above harder since I would need numbers/
There’s also the whole thing about bandwidth.
Then there’s all the sysadmin stuff to do, security updates, etc.
Then there’s still the legal and other admin roles, presumably, about DMCA, etc.
I do not have the time for any of that right now.
I think that running a YT channel large enough to support yourself has problems of equal magnitude. I also think that depending on making money from YT impressions rather than trying to develop other means of monetizing your videos (merch, embedded sponsors, patrons, community servers, digital assets, etc) is pretty risky, given YT’s track record of radically restructuring and cutting payments and Google’s track record of screwing over everyone who ever counts on them. It only takes a moment to get de-platformed for literally no damn reason. It’s worth the effort to try it. All a creator really has to do is say, “it’s okay if you mirror this content on PeerTube.” That’s not a lot of work.
For YouTube is extremely difficult, people are very used to it, and they are not moving to other platforms when there are decisions clearly against the users as they depend entirely on the creator’s decision (and they will not earn as much money on other platforms… They are still “workers”), it is not as easy as leaving Twitter and Reddit for Mastodon and Lemmy since in this case their creators are the community of users themselves.
There is also the problem of needing a huge storage to save the videos, unfeasible for an open source/FOSS community project unless the rates of adoption are enormous enough and everyone contribute/donate, or at least until we start using more efficient codecs and video compression.
