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.
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
Young up and coomers
I don’t think that word means what you think it means
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.
Ad reads and patreon
good. i don’t want capitalist advertising bs on the internet anyway.
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
Yeah the majority are 30 I think
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.
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 to mention the computing to re-encode stuff for different framerates and resolution
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.
Where does the storage for torrents come from?
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.
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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
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.
What’s SM? Smash Mouth?
Pretty sure FB is still very much alive. Most people still use it for either Instagram, Messenger or Marketplace.
FF+uBlock?
Firefox (presumably the mobile version) + uBlock Origin, an adblocker.
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 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.
Thanks! I’ll check it out!
I guess you missed the first 10 pages of ads. /s
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.
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).
Cannot agree more with this , most screens those are used at homes are good to go with 720p , or at least i fail to see a difference !
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.
And still, do you need a 4K video stream for a music video?
I understand wanting higher res audio (which still amounts to minuscule amounts of bandwith compared to the video stream) but I don’t get how image quality is important in this setting.
Depends on the music video. A lot of them look great in 4k.
But they still look great in 1080p or even 720p (audio still excluded) don’t they?
Not on my TV. The 1080p on YouTube also loses a lot of color data which is pretty noticeable on OLED. On my phone though yeah even 720p is fine.
Yeah maybe I’m not very competent on that with my 7yo cheap phone and 1080p LCD screen (free from someone who wanted to trash it) ^^’
I’ve never seen any big media content that actually benefits from more than 720p.
Have you considered seeing an optometrist instead?
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.
And then comes the question, what will they delete first?
Probably old and therefore maybe irrelevant content, but those old videos from over a decade ago are also mostly lower resolution and bitrate and won’t free up as much space.
So once that’s exhausted, what goes next?
Who will have the privilege to stay on the platform, and who won’t? Or in other words, who makes YouTube the most money?
And once that has to be decided, content will be whatever YouTube wants it to be. Which I can’t imagine being a good thing.
My guess would be deleting higher res versions of less watched videos and unwatched videos alltogether.
Anyway archiving everything everyone does is - imho - a fool’s errand.
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?
Someone smarter than me will need to figure that out. I’m a lowly software engineer, not a computer scientist.
Hey, doesn’t mean you can’t aspire to be a systems architect :D
You know, make enough decisions that weren’t perfect in the long term and you’ll learn something! …totally not speaking from experience, no.
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.
You people are delusional. You are living in a fantasy.
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.
High five for those into fantasy!!
I agree. I think it’s just good that with all this shitstorm, a lot of the good users migrated to the Lemmy.
We don’t need 100% of the Reddit population here, if we just get like 10-20% we will have potential to become the long gone golden age of Reddit.
The shitshow reddit has become now , I believe most will be looking for an alternative !
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.
In theory I agree, but we need to get past the anti-Reddit circlejerk fast.
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.
lol reddit is still kicking, people. Don’t count your chickens yet.
So is Facebook and Twitter. This meme is premature in triplicate.
Twitter, despite Elon’s best efforts, is not dead yet 😆
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.
Moreover, killing Youtube will be harder than killing any of these social media. Serving video content is very expensive.
The demands of video hosting is what makes me doubtful that decentralized YouTube could work.
It could work if everyone that used it was interested in decentralizing it, but that seems impossible from my perspective
Agreed. Friends in my discord group still bring up reddit posts daily, usually in subs with games and memes.
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.
deleted by creator
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.
Twitter - mastodon
Reddit - lemmy
What for facebook?Friendica https://friendi.ca/
There’s an alternative to YouTube? There’s a defederated Facebook?
None of these websites are dead, and youtube isn’t going anywhere. You can’t just host Zetabytes of video data on a home server.
…Not with that attitude.
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.
Yeah definitely but why pay for that?
Sooo… Facebook is dead? But it isn’t?
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.
Well it’s dead to me, OK‽
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.
How do I downvote this?
Facebook? New for me
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.
