So Elon gutted Twitter, and people jumped ship to Mastodon. Now spez did... you know... and we're on Lemmy and Kbin. Can we have a YouTube to PeerTube exodus next? With the whole ad-pocalypse over there, seems like Google is itching for it.
There already are some that are fully relying on external income and leave there video unmonitized by google. But yeah most smaller channels dont have that option.
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
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.
Mentioning Nebula reminded me that I wanted to set up an account on there - just did and very impressed with the amount of creators, some have never even mentioned that they've got a channel there?
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.
It probably wouldn't be able to be exactly like YouTube with regular "shows" but rather like YouTube was at the beginning where people just uploaded their random videos to share.
It sounds like YouTube is heading towards conflict with it's long-term content providers as well. Their new algorithm heavily favors "shorts". This really screws over the traditional medium to long format creators who arguably made YouTube successful. Sounds like they want to move quickly into the TikTok space but it's sad for a lot of creators who are losing significant income d/t this change.
But, peertube won't ever be a replacement. Most youtube creators do what they do for money. Peertube isn't the platform for that, and I'm not convinced the storage and hosting requirements will really ever be a proper replacement for youtube. What youtube does is much more expensive than what reddit or twitter do.
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!
This brings to mind an image of a bunch of men in a submersible, sitting and relaxing whilst waiting for the 'smart people' to eventually figure out an efficient way to rescue them.
I literally only have it so I can watch YouTube on Apple TV without wanting to put my foot through the TV. Without some kind of ad blocking, YouTube is completely fucking unusable.
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.
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.
It pretty much definitively is less efficient. Energy costs are a substantial portion of the expense of a data center so efficiency is something they pay very careful attention to.
Scaling things almost always makes things more efficient. Cooling a data center that does the work of a million desktop is going to use less energy to cool it than those million desktops.
How would a distributed 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 peers 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.
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).
The Internet is not a "series of tubes" ... It's a packet-switched messaging network. The fact that billions of computers are "connected" to a single address doesn't really mean much other than they've exchanged some messages within the last several minutes (or some other arbitrary amount of time).
You're not wrong: any sizeable web service must distribute to several servers and data centers for performance (e.g. response times and data throughput), and for resiliency (e.g. if a server fails then another one can take over). But the difference is these data centers have a financial incentive to maximize efficiency in both hardware costs and electricity usage (which includes cooling, etc.). Folks self-hosting Lemmy/Mastodon/etc. servers in their basement have much less incentive, and so less effort is put into eeking out every ounce of capability per dollar. Even hosting on AWS/Google/Azure/etc is never going to beat a bespoke data center dedicated to one particular application.
Although they don't necessarily publish this information, at least a data center can accurately measure its energy usage (which tends to dwarf hardware costs...). Also newer hardware will always outperform old hardware per energy usage. For either aspect I can't say the same for the server in the basement ... It's 10 year-old hardware running on the same circuit as the beer fridge next to it. I have no idea how much electricity it uses to handle like 2 users. It's a glorified space heater.
It's all about trade-offs. Fediverse applications value open standardization, availability, and long-term resiliency over efficiency, performance, and short-term profits.
The Fediverse is great, but in the short/mid-term, efficiency and ecological impact aren't things i would expect it to excel at.
The thing is creators should use libre or open content to put in their videos.
If you use copyrighted content it means you don't care about og creators stating that they don't want to use their work. What's so wrong about respecting creator's wishes about their work ?
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.
That, is the real issue. Persuading content creators to come elsewhere will always be a challenge, especially as... well. income/money is the reason most of them make videos.
This is compounded by the fact, the majority of us purposely block ads, and nobody is going to switch from youtube, to a platform filled with ads.
In terms of compensation, that gets even tricker. If- the content creators are being compensated, then the people hosted the petabytes worth of videos, is going to want to be compensated as well.
Honestly, as dumb as it sounds, the best way to implement this, might be in a form of storage-based crypto, where the coins are earned from the pieces of videos you are hosted.
Let's be honest- 99% of us don't pay a cent for watching youtube content, and over 90% of us block all of the ads.
most mid range creator already do sponsor works or patreon, fighting for the ad impression money isn't really something you can "do" unless you are in the top 0.1%. (basically, eye balls have limited time, so people flock to certain creator so they more or less feel like in the tribe, it's a social psychology thing, and why pewdepie was a thing. Or why Bieber was a thing. )
I think things like peertube would face the most difficult thing is copyright and content moderation. It would take a lot of effort to maintain good quality contents.
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