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).
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.
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
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
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.
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).
Peertube works well so far, I use this instance which specialises in hosting music creative stuff https://rankett.net/w/nqE8nNjbau7Q5UuDFCMT9z
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.
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 worth watching past season 4, imo. Season 2 is the peak season, if you ask me.
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.
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.
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”?
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.
I have not heard of odyssey and google isn’t giving good results. Can you link it?
Mastodon -> Twitter
Friendica -> Facebook
Pixelfed -> Instagram
Lemmy/kbin -> Reddit
PeerTube -> Youtube
Owncast -> Twitch
FunkWhale/Castopod -> Music/Podcast
BookWyrm -> Goodreads
WriteFreely -> Blog
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.
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.
No money to make on the fediverse => no (expensive to create) content.
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.
Honestly the only subscription I don’t mind paying for. You can’t beat ad free YouTube videos.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
You can also not pay for it and get it with ReVanced.
ReVanced also auto skips ad reads in the video itself
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
