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.
I don’t think YouTube is possible peer to peer, Lemmy/Reddit and Mastodon/twitter are mostly text with some images, not too difficult to store and network. YouTube on the other hand has astronomically high costs to store and serve their videos, more hardware than people have to spare for free
Another big thing I can see being a problem (other than cost and lack of monetization) would be the lack of Content ID. For as much shit as people give it, it does solve a big problem of lengthy and expensive lawsuits, especially for smaller channels who don’t necessarily have a company behind them.
Replacing YouTube is a bad idea
At the very least competition is needed.
YouTube is getting increasingly user-hostile with monetization with the huge increase in pre-roll and mid-roll ads, starting to lock resolutions above 1080p behind a paywall ( this was reported months ago but I’ve recently stumbled into my first two videos where 1080p60 and above was paywalled), and even getting aggressive on adblockers.
If I recall correctly, they are also testing 10 unskippable ads before sone videos now, right? Fun times ahead!
On the flip side, they provide an inherently unprofitable high-cost service that, unlike virtually all others, actually does compensate its content creators.
Nobody I talk to about this ever seems to have any idea as to where the money is supposed to come from other than not ads and not blocking adblockers and not reducing bandwidth costs. So in other words… Nowhere.
Honestly… Leave YouTube alone. Even with ads, everyone’s getting a pretty good deal out of Google on that one. You don’t want to be sharing or taking on their costs.
I would rather go for reasonable competition. Ideally more than one. I really enjoy nebula for example.
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.
Peertube always felt hard to use, and no one has really caught on to it imo.
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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.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).
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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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.
I will volunteer resources all day long to post a mostly text platform such as mastodon/lemmy/etc.
But- doing video streaming, consumes a lot of resources.
Using, my plex as an example, it supports a few handfuls of people. But- scaling that to hundreds/thousands… Its not going to be fun.
Videos take up a ton of room. Streaming them, consumes resources for transcoding.
Well, PeerTube works like torrents - which are proven to scale well. Main problem stems from monetization.
I’ll take you word for its implementation-
Main problem stems from monetization.
That, is the real issue. Persuading content creators to come elsewhere will always be a challenge, especially as… well. income/money is the reason most of them make videos.
This is compounded by the fact, the majority of us purposely block ads, and nobody is going to switch from youtube, to a platform filled with ads.
In terms of compensation, that gets even tricker. If- the content creators are being compensated, then the people hosted the petabytes worth of videos, is going to want to be compensated as well.
Honestly, as dumb as it sounds, the best way to implement this, might be in a form of storage-based crypto, where the coins are earned from the pieces of videos you are hosted.
Let’s be honest- 99% of us don’t pay a cent for watching youtube content, and over 90% of us block all of the ads.
Lbry already tried that.
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.
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.
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).
“and its premium subscription is generally considered good value”
That’s funny. You must live in a different world than I do.
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.
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.
Reddit has 500 million MAU, and this is a conservative estimate. Youtube on the other hand, is sitting comfortably at 4x this number, 2 billion MAU.
Considering that, and the nature of the platform, I’m pretty certain they are too big to fail.
No one is too big too fail. There just needs to be a better service, which right now there definitely is not.
And hosting text, images and links on decentralized servers is one thing. High bitrate video, plus the network infrastructure to serve it, is kind of a whole different ballgame. I could see this system working for some kind of torrent/file sharing service that hosts video but not a YouTube competitor.
Frankly, Mastodon already has trouble scaling just by serving up images and small bits of text, PeerTube would fall over almost instantly if it had to deal with even 1% of YouTube’s volume.
Nobody’s replacing YouTube, and from the perspective of a user who just wants to upload a couple of silly videos and watch thousands more, getting rid of the big corp that is willing to provide that ridiculously expensive to provide service feels like killing the goose that lays golden eggs.
The thing I find fascinating is I only have 1 reddit account, but I effectively have dozens of YT accounts. Just on this device I have newpipe, and libretube. Libretube has around a dozen auto generated random instances associated. Both my laptops have Freetube. I had 4 regular YouTube channels with various gmail accounts linked from when I actually posted content. Practically every device I have replaced had random YT accounts too. I know what I like to watch and importing and exporting features usually fail.
Maybe it is just newpipe being screwy but in my watch history, newpipe shows how many times you’ve watched any given upload. Most stuff I’ve watched says some bogus number of views like 6-10 when I just watched it once. Some report correctly, but most do not. It would not surprise me if this is actually YouTube. I can say, for most of the stuff I watch I’m a solid 2 dozen subscribers or more.
content creators aren’t gonna go to peertube since there is no monetization there. they ain’t gonna just rely on patreon, and sponsorships from AG1 and surfshark.
There already are some that are fully relying on external income and leave there video unmonitized by google. But yeah most smaller channels dont have that option.
Biggest issues with Peertube so far: Lack of content Lack of an iOS client
If Youtube blocks Adblockers, maybe… but I think ppl will go to Odysse&Co first
That’s going to take megabucks. Huge bandwidth, storage and compute. Who’s going to pay for it?
Everybody gangsta until they realise that their usage of services incurs costs
Not it
