On the software side, we already have PeerTube. It’s just the logistics of hosting video are way too expensive for most people to be able to cover:
- You need drives to store all those videos, preferably in several quality and codec variants so everyone can watch them.
- You need the bandwidth to serve all those videos. PeerTube can “smooth over” the initial new upload bump by using WebTorrents, which is the least worst solution if you quietly ignore all the “but muh IP address” people, but once people stop watching at the same time, you’re back to square one.
- Transcoding requires powerful and specialized hardware. Nobody in their right mind will serve videos the same way they’re uploaded, especially with the rise of new codecs like VP9 or god forbid AV1, which you simply can’t encode on a consumer CPU unless you’re fine waiting hours/days for a single upload to go through.
Yeah, i don’t see how hosting video is feasible in a decentralized way.
However, streaming is a different story. I actually think PeerTube makes a lot of sense as a Twitch alternative.
I think it works if you have something akin to a youtuber coop. Something like nebula but with the fediverse in mind.
I wouldn’t mind paying a subscription for video if I knew the money actually went to the creators, but YouTube is so anti creator that I don’t want them taking a cut.
Spending an hour on Reddit or Twitter means downloading a few megabytes of content.
Spending an hour on YouTube means downloading a few gigabytes of content. The cost to serve that is massive.
YouTube lost money when Google bought them. It continued to lose money for years. It was only after YouTube finally got large enough and their ad targeting got good enough that they started to turn a profit on YouTube.
I’m really skeptical that anything other than a big tech company could provide a similar platform like that for free.
Sure, it could work if you could get people to pay $10/month, like YouTube Premium, but people wouldn’t do that without there being enough content to make it worthwhile. It’s a chicken-and-egg problem. The only way to get past that point is with a massive amount of initial investment.
Yeah I don’t see how it’s possible to provide that service for free, and I’d be willing to pay for YouTube premium if they didn’t treat their creators like crap. The creators that do well on YouTube are the worst because they play the clickbait bullshit algorithm game and all the creators I like that put out high quality content have a hard time making a living
I have pinned video to IPFS, before, and it streamed well from an IPFS gateway. I lack an understanding of what the impact to a gateway would be, though, if many users were doing this.
One thought would be software that would automatically pin any video you viewed, or the partial content you viewed, for a period of time. Popular videos with many views per day would also be supported by many peers to pull from. Videos viewed infrequently might be pinned only by the content creator or a handful of others. The like/upvote concept could be tied into pinning, even on a scale such that an ordinary upvote would subscribe you to, say, 3 days of pinning, and a super-upvote would subscribe you to 20 days.
I would rather post this link for peertube: https://joinpeertube.org/
Someone else already pointed towards odysee.com. However, I think it speaks volumes that the best video explaining the concept I found on youtube… even though the exact same creator has a channel on odysee.com as well.
However, there are a couple of youtubers also present on odysee, like “3Blue1Brown” or a bit more niche Jack Rhysiders podcast… think I’m going to test this over the couple of days/weeks for a bit
I just checked out Odysee for the first time, and the recommendations were mostly right-wing conspiracy crap listed in the same category as Veritasium. No thanks, that’s my main complaint about youtube these days.
yeah, I fully understand that. I tried it a couple days ago for the first time and I’m still not sure what to make of it. However, I recently opened youtube on freshly installed PC recently and wasnt logged in… oh boy… all the the influencers influencing about nothing… the reaction videos about reaction videos… and why is everyone still poor when there is so much great advice out there to get rich? I hope Odysee allows to ignore all that crap over time… otherwise I wont stick around long either… we’ll see :)
A feature like “Don’t recommend this channel” that actually worked is all it would take for me. A downvote feature would help keep the crap from being recommended in the first place. Youtube once had both features, fully functional. I don’t know exactly when but they removed those features but kept the facade. Complete fucking assholes.
As my own bit of disobedience I “watch” muted 4K videos as a screensaver when I’m not at the computer. Of course ublock origin and privacy badger are always running so no ad revenue to them but I abuse their service with max bandwidth use.
I just use newpipe (still uses YouTube’s stuff tho)
