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.
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.
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.
Yeah, good point. The others are mainly hosting text and some images
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.
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For YouTube is extremely difficult, people are very used to it, and they are not moving to other platforms when there are decisions clearly against the users as they depend entirely on the creator’s decision (and they will not earn as much money on other platforms… They are still “workers”), it is not as easy as leaving Twitter and Reddit for Mastodon and Lemmy since in this case their creators are the community of users themselves.
There is also the problem of needing a huge storage to save the videos, unfeasible for an open source/FOSS community project unless the rates of adoption are enormous enough and everyone contribute/donate, or at least until we start using more efficient codecs and video compression.
I think at most you’d see people cross posting videos there as a secondary platform
That is precisely why I run my own instance, it’s essentially a backup from YouTube of my own dumb videos: https://peertube.bloonface.com
But honestly that’s pretty much all it is. It’s not really worth much more than that to me.
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.
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.
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.
Youtubers and streamers are different as they create content for getting paid by those services. Peer to peer video content cant replace youtube as it is without government level universal income basically. Most dont make enough from patreon or w/e to survive
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I know it’s very difficult to find good PeerTube instances, I’m trying to update my list when I find good ones: https://jeena.net/notes/1230
Would creators actually move there? Say what you will about YouTube but at least they usually compensate the creators.
Peertube always felt hard to use, and no one has really caught on to it imo.
First I’ve heard of alternatives to YouTube. Do they pay content creators the same or is it just people posting for free there?
They are just offering the free service of video hosting. There are no advertisements and no paid accounts, so all they could share are costs, not income. They are not an advertisement/monetarization service.
Each channel has a option to put your support information so people can pay you through patreon, etc. Peertube instances are offering their video hosting for free. You can put in video ads or patreon like services to enable payments. Peertube instances can ask for money as well to help with hosting costs. It’s the same business model as all other federated software. The cost of video hosting is distributed by instances and also uses bittorrent to help with sharing the load.
So would it be feasible to run a peertube instance with content at sufficient scale, then inject and sell ads?
I meant in video ads as in “this video is sponsored by…”. At least i think that’s the case. There is no built in way to have ads in peertube. Everything would have to be supported by links to services like patreon. anyone doing what you said could be defederated.
Pay?
YouTube pays content creators: https://www.youtube.com/howyoutubeworks/product-features/monetization/
This pay likely makes up a significant portion of YouTube creators’ revenue in addition to in-video sponsor spots/whatever a creator’s equivalent is. Without this kind of payment it’s not likely that a YouTube competitor could take off in a meaningful way.
I mean: if a platform is free, and there are no ads, and it’s operated on a charity model where the operator has a monetary loss, where the money for the creators can come from?
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.
If a platform didn’t do transcoding, and requested content creators do it themselves, I wonder if that’d help enough to make it more feasible? Then its just bandwidth and storage, and storage has only gotten cheaper over the years.
Yeah, I wonder what the cost breakdown is for transcoding, storage, streaming, etc.
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
Replacing YouTube is a bad idea
I would rather go for reasonable competition. Ideally more than one. I really enjoy nebula for example.
At the very least competition is needed.
YouTube is getting increasingly user-hostile with monetization with the huge increase in pre-roll and mid-roll ads, starting to lock resolutions above 1080p behind a paywall ( this was reported months ago but I’ve recently stumbled into my first two videos where 1080p60 and above was paywalled), and even getting aggressive on adblockers.
On the flip side, they provide an inherently unprofitable high-cost service that, unlike virtually all others, actually does compensate its content creators.
Nobody I talk to about this ever seems to have any idea as to where the money is supposed to come from other than not ads and not blocking adblockers and not reducing bandwidth costs. So in other words… Nowhere.
Honestly… Leave YouTube alone. Even with ads, everyone’s getting a pretty good deal out of Google on that one. You don’t want to be sharing or taking on their costs.
If I recall correctly, they are also testing 10 unskippable ads before sone videos now, right? Fun times ahead!
Speaking of, got any good peertube channels? Tbh, I’m more familiar with nebula and floatplane - where YT creators made their own platform. Maybe that’s where things are headed
Nebula is not bad. I paid for it for a year, but had some issues with not enough content and the buggy UI on Firefox. If Youtube blocks adblockers, I’ll certainly go back to it.
Well Google is gutting ad blockers. So maybe there will be an extremely minor exodus yet.
On PC, this only really affects you if you’re still using Google Chrome. Firefox isn’t quite as nice as Chrome (don’t @ me, it’s the truth) but it is serviceable and uBlock Origin deals with 99% of ads just fine.
as disgusting as it feels, I think paying for Youtube Premium is a pretty good deal. You get no ads, and creators get much, much more money per view. I’m not sure what it is for videos, but with Youtube Music, by band gets literally ten times as much per listen from as Premium subscriber than an “ad supported” one. Given the sheer amount of otherwise free high quality material on the platform, the tiny amount they ask each month for it is pretty decent. IMO, YMMV, IANAL, consult your doctor before taking, etc
Because of the increased revenue to creators I don’t feel so bad about installing sponsorblock to skip in-video ads
Me and my partner pay jointly for Premium and I wouldn’t want to go back. No ads on any device we watch on, knowing that the creators get a good chunk of change from it, is bliss.
Got YT Premium for my family the past few years, it’s been great NGL. It probably gets more use than any other streaming service, and would probably be the last paid service i gave up for video.
Fair point. I watch a lot of YT and block ads (though it sounds like they’re finally cracking down on that). I support some creators on Nebula and Patreon, but I guess YT Premium is basically like those.
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
But they are also going to struggle to monetise their content.
Does peer tube have monetisation features? Or would it all be sponsors, patreons and product placement?
Yes but it’s the creators that brings the people. YouTube worked because at the beginning it was the only place where you could upload videos and nobody was thinking about making a dime.
That’s true.
I use RSS feed to follow youtube channels, but if they happen to upload to odysee or peertube as well, I follow them there instead. Just to give a YouTube competitor a bit more traffic.
