this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2023

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Is there a fediverse alternative for YouTube? If not, why? (self.asklemmy)

submitted 2 years ago by weird_nugget to c/asklemmy

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[–] [email protected] 52 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (5 children)

To answer the "why not" part of that question, copying from one of my previous comments:

There's an enormous amount of content uploaded to YouTube, as much as 30,000 hours of video uploaded per hour. That's around 1PB per hour assuming most videos are uploaded in 1080p.

I wasn't able to find an official source for what YouTube's total data storage is, but this estimate puts it at 10 EB or 10,000,000,000 GB of video.

On Amazon AWS that would cost $3 Billion per month to store. The actual cost to Google is probably much lower because of economy of scale and because it is run by and optimized for them, but it is still a colossal figure. They offset the cost with ads, data collection, and premium subscription, but I would imagine running YouTube is still a net loss for Google.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 years ago

Oh wow those are incredible numbers!! And most of the videos uploaded are pure garbage. :(

[–] app_priori 4 points 2 years ago (1 children)

If only we could crowdfund billions per month for a video site run by the community for the community!

[–] WeirdGoesPro 9 points 2 years ago

I believe they call that taxes.

[–] phelan 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Not that it makes much of a difference, but storing 10 EB on AWS S3 is more like 300 million USD a month. With some tiering options you can reduce that a bit further, but still it's a huge number. Following your link you seem to have used FSx Lustre for calculation, not S3.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

That calculation may also take into account upload and download bandwidth. And I know there are like 100 different cloud products in the AWS console. I don’t know much about high scale performance tuning but I bet dozens of those AWS services would be involved in something like youtube.

[–] weird_nugget 2 points 2 years ago

Damn that sucks but makes sense

[–] [email protected] 27 points 2 years ago (1 children)

PeerTube! Check out TILvids for a good example.

[–] weird_nugget 3 points 2 years ago

Nice!

[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Just to put the storage issues in perspective, a minute of HD video is about 120mb. Moby Dick is 1.2 mb in plain text. So for every one minute of video, you could store all of Moby Dick 100 times.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 2 years ago (2 children)

I like Moby as an artist, but I really don't want to read about his dick 100 times.

[–] Aceticon 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Spoiler alert:

spoiler

The book tell us about how huge it is

[–] atomdmac 1 points 2 years ago

The answer might surprise you!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago

Not quite, if I go to download the new Dune 2 trailer right now (3:03) the 1080p version is 23MB, 720p is 14MB, 360p is 7.5MB, and 144p is 4.3MB.

[–] fubo 15 points 2 years ago (1 children)

https://instances.joinpeertube.org/instances

[–] weird_nugget 4 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Peer to peer seems like a good idea to cope with the ridiculous amount of data used for videos. Hopefully this gets more popular over time!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago (1 children)

It's not peer to peer though. It's similar to Lemmy and Mastodon where someone hosts an instance and serves video from that. Except with video it gets very expensive, so I don't think server admins want to see a migration happen.

A peer to peer solution would actually be cheaper for everyone involved.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Does it have a payment model built into it?

Seems like infrastructure cost is a central problem of video hosting, so features to distribute that cost load among users would be must-have for any video service not bankrolled by a huge corp.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Yeah, if you had users storing the videos locally and a P2P streaming system you could reduce the cost, but I don't think you can implement something like that through a browser.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Technically it's possible, popcorntime worked (or works, I don't know the current state of it) similarly. It would not work properly on mobile though, p2p is very demanding on poor little device.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

Yeah, people would accept running a P2P client on their main computer, but a phone has limited resources where running a P2P server has real costs (in battery, metered bandwidth, etc).

Maybe it could work like podcasts in the olden days where your subscriptions get predownloaded when possible, but it's way too many steps compared to YouTube.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 years ago

I believe there's Peertube

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 years ago

YouTube basically killed all of the original video sharing sites because it was so convenient. The cost of setting up and running such a site is astronomical.

[–] Clbull 4 points 2 years ago

Videos take up a lot of storage space and require some serious hardware specs to properly serve to users, no matter how much computer science wizardry you use to compress them and reduce their load.

It also becomes far more difficult to moderate and monetize such content. I bring up monetization because it is a damn necessity to keep a platform like this running. No amount of donations, voluntary moderator hours, FOSS packages or copyleft pipe dreams are going to pay for the financial and personnel costs of a large video site.

Many competitors to YouTube have popped up and failed like VidMe, Dailymotion, Break, Blip, Vimeo, Bitchute, Storyfire and oh so many others. The only one that has even managed to compete with YouTube came from a massive Chinese state sponsored tech firm (TikTok.)

And before you mention Rumble, they're pandering to a very specific niche of controversial right-wingers who have been largely deplatformed from mainstream social media. If it weren't for Donald Trump and Andrew Tate, they would've shut down years ago. Kick meanwhile is basically being bankrolled by a crypto slot machine website and is only attracting streamers because of how badly Twitch have enshittified their platform.