this post was submitted on 02 Nov 2023
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I've made most of my arguments in other replies, but here I'll just say this: Most of what is on YouTube is worthless garbage.
They've developed a business model around being the garbage collector and storage provider for home movies, dipshits that want to be viral by pranking people, your cousin's drum solo during their recital, every awful cover of all of your favorite songs, and some guy's unhinged political rant (recorded in his den at 2am)
I think maybe it would be ok if they posted their stuff to some federated provider that charged a few bucks per gigabyte. They sure wouldn't lose money on bandwidth; the videos wont get viewed more than once. If that.
As for actual creators? They'll be able to self host, or band together and make mini-services funded by like-minded fans (and probably some sponsors, because capitalism), and everyone will be able to access everything on an interconnected... what's the word? Oh yeah, "Internet". You know, the thing we had before 12 companies took over everything.
Those creator services exist (e.g. nebula) and are great, but they usually cost money, because video hosting is apparently too expensive to just run on donations, and competing with google on advertising is even more of an uphill battle
I currently support Nebula. That was easy money to spend, unlike the prospect of giving YouTube anything.
Also - since they actually curate their content - there's less of it, and higher quality. Kinda speaks to some of both our points. If they had a policy of "free to all, after a while" (like a lot of patreon people do), they might well have attempted some kind of distributed hosting. Hard to say for sure, but a guy can dream.
Federated video streaming may not have all the questions answered right now, but people are already attempting it. I think the right optimizations, the right content, and the right audience will push it really far. And maybe it won't be "YouTube quality" for a while (or ever), but who needs 4k60 Minecraft/Fortnight lets-plays anyway?
There are already lots of places to post low value video. Basically, every social media site out there let's you post the home movie you want your friends to see and don't care if any stranger ever sees it.
I have a YouTube channel. It was created as part of an experiment that failed. I think I might have a total of 4 videos posted there. If it comes right down to it, the traffic I expect for my personal projects means I could just post any videos I create directly on my website.
And that personal website is where we need to get back to. I wish all the fancy programmers at Meta and elsewhere would just put their energies into creating the tools that let people put content on their own site as easily as on Facebook. Add some semi-structured data that can be leveraged by displaying the results of pre-built custom web searches and you should be able to approximate the experience of Facebook.
That's one of the use-cases I've had in mind. You have your site, you have a video. If you posted your video to your site though PeerTube (or really any implementation of ActivityPub), both your direct site viewers AND anyone searching PeerTube (et al) would see it.
If lots of people did that, you have a basis for a version of distributed YouTube. Small creators' (or people just messing around) videos might load slower or only have lower bandwidth options (resolution), but larger, focused creators (CorridorCrew, Kurzgesagt, SciShow, etc) would have more options through viewer support and collaborations.
Yes, that fits my own mental model of the online world I'd like to see.