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
this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2023
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Technology
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Peertube always felt hard to use, and no one has really caught on to it imo.
Have a look at tilvids.com. I know of a couple of large YouTubers that crosspost their stuff there, and there are probably more that I don't know about.
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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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Replacing YouTube is a bad idea
I would rather go for reasonable competition. Ideally more than one. I really enjoy nebula for example.
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Would creators actually move there? Say what you will about YouTube but at least they usually compensate the creators.
First I’ve heard of alternatives to YouTube. Do they pay content creators the same or is it just people posting for free there?
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Reddit has 500 million MAU, and this is a conservative estimate. Youtube on the other hand, is sitting comfortably at 4x this number, 2 billion MAU.
Considering that, and the nature of the platform, I'm pretty certain they are too big to fail.
The thing I find fascinating is I only have 1 reddit account, but I effectively have dozens of YT accounts. Just on this device I have newpipe, and libretube. Libretube has around a dozen auto generated random instances associated. Both my laptops have Freetube. I had 4 regular YouTube channels with various gmail accounts linked from when I actually posted content. Practically every device I have replaced had random YT accounts too. I know what I like to watch and importing and exporting features usually fail.
Maybe it is just newpipe being screwy but in my watch history, newpipe shows how many times I've watched any given upload. Most stuff I've watched says some bogus number of views like 6-10 when I just watched it once. Some report correctly, but most do not. It would not surprise me if this is actually YouTube. I can say, for most of the stuff I watch I'm a solid 2 dozen subscribers or more.
No one is too big too fail. There just needs to be a better service, which right now there definitely is not.
And hosting text, images and links on decentralized servers is one thing. High bitrate video, plus the network infrastructure to serve it, is kind of a whole different ballgame. I could see this system working for some kind of torrent/file sharing service that hosts video but not a YouTube competitor.
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I wouldn't for the reasons mentioned by others.
There's no monetization; I would have to find, attract, and deal with sponsors on my own.
There's not really much in the way of audience which makes the above harder since I would need numbers/
There's also the whole thing about bandwidth.
Then there's all the sysadmin stuff to do, security updates, etc.
Then there's still the legal and other admin roles, presumably, about DMCA, etc.
I do not have the time for any of that right now.
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Doubt it, it's expensive to host and creators won't have ways to ways to monetize it as easily as YouTube.
Also, I wouldn't really call the Twitter and Reddit cases "exodus". As much as I would like to see the fediverse succeed, the number of users on mastodon and Lemmy are just a blip on the radar.
I still see the same links on my Lemmy frontage days after they have been submitted, it's far less active than Reddit.
I hate this notion that a platform isn't successful unless it has a billion users. As long as there's a critical mass of people, it's fine. One thing I've realised browsing lemmy for the past week is just how much of my Reddit experience was defined by the same handful of Twitter screenshots and rehosted tiktoks being reposted over and over again like every week.
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The lemmy front page default sort is currently broken IIRC. try sorting by new comments.
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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 things rolling. Fingers crossed it's soon!
its really interesting how much we want an alt to common social medias now imo. for example, streamers are migrating from Twitch to Kick, and as you mentioned, Youtube to PeerTube/rumble
All these companies are constantly pushing just how greedy they can be and it's getting so tiresome. Short term gains and shareholders are the worst thing to happen to a free Internet aside from governments
To the internet? Heck, to the whole world, if it weren't for shareholders, profits and taxes, climate measures to curb climate change could be more aggressive.
That's unlikely. Both Reddit and Twitter speak or at least spoke to people who enjoy a certain image of being anti establishment (in one way or another and whether that's warranted or not). Youtube just doesn't. You can't get more mainstream than Youtube.
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I think this is super interesting, and a really good idea. But as others have stated in this thread, very costly.
However until technology catches up, maybe we could have an interstitial federated platform. One that's super decentralized. Like 90% of the users running their own instance, decentralized. Anyone with a NAS can host they're own vids. Then the other 10% that are willing to host high bandwidth, high capacity servers, can work as caching for the most popular videos.