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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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, FB was killed by the younger people abandoning it for other SM. Twitter was killed by Musk. Reddit was killed by Spez.
And by "killed", I mean "lost some users and content quality". They still have millions of active users.
And my personal feed on Reddit is pretty much unchanged. Very few niche subreddits went into an extended blackout, so I still got all my content. And since I use the mobile website (FF+uBlock), the API change didn't affect me that much. But I hope more communities from Reddit will move over here, especially the non-tech ones.
Google isn't concerned with their search engine right now. ABC is a mega tech conglomerate, the search engine is like a miniscule about to their revenue.
90% chance that if you use DuckDuckGo or Bing, it's on a chromium browser, which means you very link have a Google account
I can recommend Kagi. Yes, it'll cost you to use it (but not a lot, eg. I'm on the $10/month plan), but people expecting to get everything for free online is what got us into this mess in the first place.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Exactly. The users who have moved here are disproportionately commenters, power posters, and moderators from reddit. I was a top 1% poster on reddit, lots of OC, but I've essentially stopped participating there. I occasionally comment, but I don't make posts on reddit anymore. If a significant fraction of power posters (and not just the reposters) and moderators migrate to lemmy, lemmy will have disproportionately good content, while the reddit experience will degrade further into reposts and poor moderation. I think lemmy already has disproportionately good posts and engagement, just still pretty small at the moment.
people often forget that reddit initially achieved network effect because a small number of high quality users left digg for being too captured by corporate interests. the rest took 10 years to play out, but inevitably when the mainstream follows these initial users, the platform dies and it is time for another migration. I think we've been ready for a while.
Yeah, I kinda agree. I like the niche, albiet small, community these decentralized platforms offer. TBH, I love the trade of brands not pointing their content firehoses in our direction. While I love the idea of more people using lemmy, for example, I worry about the inflection pointe where that changes and this place gets ruined.
Facebook is nowhere dead. Everyone I meet wants to chat via Messenger, small firms here don't bother creating a website anymore, they create a facebook page (' cause everyone's there) and local/company communities use facebook groups to talk. Not to mention event hosts, they create fb events. If you are interested in topics that are liked globally, the fediverse is getting better. But if you are looking for a local community, you'll rarely find any. The lemmy page of my country is basically dead, the sub however is thriving.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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 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.
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.
As far as I can tell Filecoin works by having clients pay to store files on people’s servers so there’s still a question of who is going to pay for it.
Better to move them to something more private at the very least. Then we can slowly heal their addiction through in-app propaganda and purposefully declined algorithm performance over a long period of time.
NSFW, but redgifs is trying to be the xxx equivalent of TikTok. Redgifs is okay but there's no app, someone could easily step in and take their model, make an app for clients, and decentralize it.
Once that takes off, encourage SFW content too in a separate section of the app.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
I dont see any source code, so I wouldn't trust it, especially with the fact that you already mentioned two alternatives that are open source, that will fill the gap.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Am I the only one who thinks once something becomes a monolith of a platform, then it should be regulated (or dare I say), nationalized/ turned into a non profit?
Fine platform buuuut lots of nuts over there, I watched Mental Outlaw and Brightside Films i think(?) and got straight up nazi stuff on the recommendations sidebar, the comments on some videos are also kinda insane
YouTube will be a very tough but to crack because, as opposed to all other sites, YouTube let's you upload Terabytes of data for free... Something you can't do without tons of money and a large team...