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.
good. i don’t want capitalist advertising bs on the internet anyway.
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?
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
Yeah, no. The deaths of those websites have not happened yet, and when they do, the Fediverse will not be the one holding the scythe
Right, it’ll be death by suicides.
Google should probably be on there too. Can’t find anything either non-corporate or irrelevant these days.
I was looking for js libraries that extended the ecma array prototypes, Google gave me a billion pages about how to use the ecma array prototypes.
I guess you missed the first 10 pages of ads. /s
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.
FF+uBlock?
Firefox (presumably the mobile version) + uBlock Origin, an adblocker.
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.
YouTube is a behemoth that will not be replaced.
I mean you’re right that YouTube isn’t going anywhere, but they’re going to either delete that data or start charging you for it at some point
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.
If they did that, I wouldn’t be able to find a fix for the fuel line getting kinked in my BG86 leaf blower. You know that video with 48 views that exactly solves the problem I am having? Same applies across basically every niche device or mechanical issue and is one of the primary reasons I find myself on youtube.
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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.
Is size really the issue though? I can torrent more than I can store on my hard drives.
Seems like you could build a video streaming service on that. (Actually I think some people already did this.)
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
Well, time to switch to watching Nebula?
I can’t see how it will work for small-time creators though. Or for people who just want to show a video online.
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.
Well, one question is how it’d be paid for. You can’t really have a federated payment provider, can you?
So would you have to pay for each separate server somehow, gathering them up like streaming service subscriptions?
You can’t really have a federated payment provider, can you?
Not to sound like a crypto bro, but this is literally the biggest benefit of cryptocurrencies, easy transfer of money between people wallet to wallet, and you can choose your exchange to exchange the money between crypto and cash.
Unfortunately crypto bros absolutely ruined crypto for everything it could’ve been
Yeah, that’s fair.
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’ve never seen any big media content that actually benefits from more than 720p.
Have you considered seeing an optometrist instead?
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
Thanks. And it’s understandable, I’m guessing most of the people downvoting are the ones who are trying to defend their sunk cost after having bought into a solution without a problem.
That said, there do are valid use cases for stuff like 1080p or 4K (or for, say, >= 120 fps). I just don’t think modern “big corp” media, or TV shows, are good examples of it. Like, honestly, what do you want to watch Avengers: Endgame in 4K for? To salivate at the warts on The Hulk’s groin?
You’re right on that too. Those movies actually look worse in 4k because low resolutions hide the bad CGI.
I have a large collection of 4k blurays for my favorite movies though. Like Blade Runner 2049 and Dune look fantastic. But not every movie deserves the hard disk space.
lol reddit is still kicking, people. Don’t count your chickens yet.
So is Facebook and Twitter. This meme is premature in triplicate.
All while the fediverse still has low numbers.
I like the concept, but if your only selling point is “it’s like email, you can use any instance” it’s not going to be popular to most people.
Twitter, despite Elon’s best efforts, is not dead yet 😆
Moreover, killing Youtube will be harder than killing any of these social media. Serving video content is very expensive.
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Big mainstream subs are shit but they always were. Cool niche communities are the same.
mostly the same. I feel like even niche places get some of the annoying reddit mentality that has annoyed me for quite a while. There’s still the hivemind and circle jerky stuff in small places. It’s felt like less of that here, but also only a fraction of the people are on Lemmy so that will change when more people come.
I mean, the circlejerk is already here. This meme shows that. The amount of users saying “fuck spez”, as if he gives a shit and is remotely affected is like…bruh.
Nope, sorry: no revolution for you.
It’s a delusional circlejerk.
So for twitter it’s mastodon, for reddit it’s lemmy, for youtube odysee maybe, but what is it for facebook?
Mastodon -> Twitter
Friendica -> Facebook
Pixelfed -> Instagram
Lemmy/kbin -> Reddit
PeerTube -> Youtube
Owncast -> Twitch
FunkWhale/Castopod -> Music/Podcast
BookWyrm -> Goodreads
WriteFreely -> Blog
Now if we could somehow get LinkedIn. It will be the last core of evil pro corporatism.
Twitter - mastodon
Reddit - lemmy
What for facebook?Friendica https://friendi.ca/
Facebook? New for me
No money to make on the fediverse => no (expensive to create) content.
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.
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.
I feel like addictive algorithms are a big part of what we need to get away from.
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.
There’s an alternative to YouTube? There’s a defederated Facebook?
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.
Peertube
I think you can replace all social media with a decentralized version, except YouTube. Reason is cost and monetization.
Yep people don’t realize the cost of running YouTube, and why all the creators are there.
Cause they share that cost, and have the most eyeballs. Far and away.