this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2023
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Technology
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They're the safest. It has the highest cost to run of any other site pretty much. The amount of data uploaded is staggering.
They may deserve to be replaced, but a competitor has the highest hurdles to overcome. You pretty much need to be another tech giant or the public needs to have a new perspective on how to pay for content rather than ads.
I don't think we'll see a Lemmy etc of YouTube unless a lot of people are cool with sharing their bandwidth for little benefit.
Yeah only way I see it working is if it's more of a peer to peer / torrenting concept. As in while you use it, you are "seeding" other videos / content as well.
PeerTube is exactly this, it's federated and uses WebTorrent. https://joinpeertube.org/
Well that's cool as hell - thanks for the info.
This reads like an AI generated conversation trying to sell PeerTube.
How couldn't you guys know about PeerTube?? 😅
I didn't know about it either til like yesterday! :P
The experience of using something so much you forget other people might never even have heard of it is very relatable however.
Does the seeding work in a personally easily controllable way, e.g. you only see the videos you watch and allow it to seed? I'm not super familiar with torrenting beyond the very basics, let alone however this might differ.
I'm thinking here mainly of making sure people aren't just generally seeding everything in a way that would potentially make people unknowingly/unintentionally seed / party to any distribution of child abuse materials, snuff, revenge porn, or so on.
As far as I know, you seed videos you watch.
I recently stumbled over Odysee and am not exactly sure where to put them category wise. they are a federated service as well, aren't they?
No, Odysee/LBRY operates on blockchain/crypto. It aims to be decentralised, and in that sense it's bit like federation, but it's completely different.
And then you run into the challenge of moderation.
If it's possible to be handed random videos to seed that you've never watched, criminals would take advantage of that to upload illicit content that no one wants hosted...
It may only work to seed videos that you've explicitly whitelisted. Ex. Maybe "liking" the video also automatically volunteers some of your bandwidth to seed it. But then you will still open yourself up to legal disputes from copyright trolls. Just like YT, they would still be able to go around spamming C&Ds at everyone, and who is going to have time or money to fight it? Most would just take the video down immediately.
And that's all assuming that exposing your IP directly to the public doesn't leave you vulnerable.
On top of all of that, one of YT's biggest values is that you can view most content in a browser while not logged in. Which I'm guessing is where a huge number of views come from. The core users would just be footing the bill for a bunch of freeloaders. But assuming everything else is solved, maybe it's worth the tradeoff...?
I think it might still just have to allow advertizing. Maybe not individually targeted advertizing, but like a general banner ad in a sidebar for the server host's benefit, or a video creator's midroll sponsor ad. Or a a small server subscription fee for reasonably large servers, like apps do.
Even if the hosts make some money off it and it's not entirely free and ad free for all instances, it could still be better than one single, centralized corporation that's in control of everything and can monetize however it wants without consequence.
But regardless, the issue with potentially unintentionally seeding child abuse materials, revenge porn, and so on is my main concern. I personally won't touch the platform until and unless I'm sure I will have control over what I do or don't seed and that I will never end up unknowingly doing this just by using the service.
ISPs would need to give americans upload speed worth a damn first.
I internetted in a time where sharing an audio file was a real undertaking, maybe with better infrastructure the size of video won't be a problem.
Maybe it's me being short-sighted but I don't see video going far beyond 8k for almost all applications.
All social media should be publicly owned, democratically run, and publicly funded.