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
this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2023
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Technology
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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
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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.
I see the switch from YouTube will be the final move, because it is has the most hurdles to overcome. Smart people will eventually figure out an efficient way to get this one moving as well. Fingers crossed!
A lot of people in this thread talking about how it's not feasible because content creators wouldn't get paid and I agree if you expect that same quality of content.
But I think peertube opens the door for a lot of the more organic content of just people sharing interesting/entertaining/educational videos with others without any expectation of being paid. I've already watched some really good videos on peertube that feel a lot more like the old days of YouTube.
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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
YouTube has a bunch of issues:
1/ climate change:
- A big centralised server needs lots of power, of cooling, a big pipe for upload/download,
- algorithms, metrics, content id, big size imagery (4k), all this is really needing a bunch of energy in itself to run,
- advertising in general is an ecological nightmare.
2/ monetisation:
- content id is a gamble for creators. A video can be demonetised for the dumbest reasons under the pretext of copyright infringement,
- no one knows how the algorithm works, it means one video can be suggested to a lot of people and the next one won't. So income is randomised,
- the purpose of monetisation for content creators exist to legitimate the advertising and the monetisation of user's personal data's. Not the other way around. YouTube is not a platform made to retribute creators.
Going on Peertube could mostly fix every ecological problems for the lost of the uncertainty of the monetisation system.
Plus there is a psychological weigh on creators that goes with the monetisation and algorithm of YouTube.
How would such a system be more efficient? That is very counter intuitive. In addition the question would be who pays for PeerTube. Because unlike Mastodon or Lemmy and the likes, storing large amounts of video files is actually damn expensive.
I'm pretty sure the average successful YouTube content creators can invest in one computer to host his own content on peertube. For start that's all what is needed.
Video storage is a false problem, creators already store their content locally (to not lose the work if there is any issue).
On the technical side, others have answer that question here but in short:
- decentralised with peer to peer means that the more a video is shared the more it will be available, even with small size pipes (when I'm watching your content, others can watch it through me),
- you don't have to pay for hudge and hardware so less money wasted, but it needs a strong network of pipes, which can improve internet navigation as a all,
- instances are nodes of a network, if one fails the others stays up,
- better scalability cause p2p,
- peertube can run on rather old tech so I'd say it's more efficient.
I will need more precise questions for better answers.
My assumption was based on the idea to have a proper YouTube replacement. Not some run down video storage for a hand full of large content creators that can afford it.
- The scalability you buy via P2P also means an increased storage. So if you want to offer a similar platform that is used in a similar way then you probably would need a multiple of the current storage capacity that YouTube offers. Likely close to an exabyte of storage (assuming that YouTube has just about 300 petabytes. Which likely is a lower number by now.)
- Especially for the amount of users consuming the content you would need a good distribution factor. Popular content would need to be distribution over thousands of pees for it to kinda work out. So a lot of people could share the necessary video data, making the storage a problem.
- Big servers in a datacenter will always be more efficient because they are designed to be compared to consumer hardware. It's like replacing a central power plant with a small power plant per home. It won't deliver the same efficiency and is a waste of resources. Ecologically speaking.
creators already store their content locally
A lot of creators delete at least the raw footage because they don't have enough space and it would be too expensive. One creator hosting their own content wouldn't even begin to scale in such a scenario. They would need powerful hardware and serious network connectivity. Something the large creators probably could afford, but most couldn't.
peertube can run on rather old tech so I’d say it’s more efficient.
Especially old tech is less efficient than current generations.
Smaller servers doesn't mean less work is being done. It means the work is being distributed outside the server farm. Quite likely it is less efficient, not more.
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I'm pretty sure you got that backwards ... Distributed systems like Lemmy and PeerTube rely on large amounts of redundancy and duplication. In general, centralized systems are going to be more efficient by default. YouTube is an "ecological nightmare" simply because it's absolutely massive. If PeerTube grows to anywhere near the same scale, you can be sure it will far eclipse total energy usage (and also be harder to measure).
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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.
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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.
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If Youtube blocks Adblockers, maybe.. but I think ppl will go to Odysse&Co first
I see existential problems for peertube, because of copyright infringement.
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.
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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.
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Nebula has been quite successful as far as I can tell. A whole bunch of educational YouTubers have moved over or were part of establishing it and honestly it works well. Videos can download to your device, the quality is the same, the app is a tiny bit janky but nowhere near as bad as all the ads etc on the YouTube app, and the cost is actually reasonable and goes in a reasonable share to the creators. I strongly prefer direct access to creators like this and also like on Patreon. Direct support means there is no advertiser in between to demonetise a video or have it taken down because it is controversial. You can't even have a WW2 documentary on YouTube but you can have actual Nazis, but on Nebula you get analysis and history without Nike or Surfshark being reticent to sponsor a video.
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Gotta be a way for folks to get paid. Most of the folks I watch on YouTube do it for a living.
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I've looked at peertube a few times, and everytime I do, it seems to be filled with nothing but videos about the latest cryptoscamcoin. I have zero interest in that at all. Until they get content worth watching, it's not going to happen.
It’s the chicken & egg problem; people won’t use peertube because there’s no good content on there and content creators wont go there because the people aren’t there
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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.
I think at most you’d see people cross posting videos there as a secondary platform
Problem is youtube is a platform that pays its content creators. It won't ever happen. If discord ever decides they want to be profitable then that'll be next.
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It doesn't really seem workable right now. A video platform that just lets anybody upload anything and everything onto a large main server is going to use completely absurd amounts of storage and bandwidth, so PeerTube can only really work if most people either self-host or join small communities to host their videos.
Unfortunately, PeerTube is absolutely terrible for discovering videos you'd enjoy on smaller instances. Until they can fix that, there's really no hope of it taking off. I'd love to see it happen, but we're just not there right now.
Yea, having a competitor to youtube seem near impossible. The only reason youtube survived was because Google bought them, who was able to provide them with the insane resources required for a video hosting platform. Similar to Twitch being bought by Amazon, which has AWS.
Memes and text comments can be easily self hosted, but video hosting requires an expensive server farm with petabytes of SSDs, bandwidth and lots of GPUs for transcoding. Ok if you make a subscription only service like nebula or floatplane, but it's impossibile to host an ad-free service and rely on the few donations.
Linus Tech Tips recently did a video where they go over the cost and complexity of running something like YouTube.
Frankly I’m surprised 4k video wasn’t locked behind Premium from the start.
Part of me wonders if YouTube could have scaled up more gracefully if they pushed a subscription option earlier (and priced it better, I hate how it’s bundled with a music service I don’t want).
Ads fucking suck, but I think most people recognize they are a necessary evil in order to run any kind of free social video platform at a meaningful scale.
i agree with that video also, free 4k video for something that most times it's just entertainment when you're doing something else, it's a bit pointless
i have a 4k monitor but most of the times i watch 720p from my invidious instance because i prefer saving my own bandwidth to the visual quality for this kind of content.
If it's a movie, then it's different, 4k it's a must
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That's going to take megabucks. Huge bandwidth, storage and compute. Who's going to pay for it?
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