YouTube might be the biggest challenge yet given the extraordinary amount of storage needed to recreate it.
this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2023
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Its also getting the content creators onto the new platform. Thats a bigger challenge I think, without creators it's a dead site really, and making videos is significantly more difficult than image or text posting.
For storage, if we assume the format would be WebM at 1080p, 60fps and 20 minutes in length, it turns out to about 1GB. Even a cheap VPS instance usually offer 50GB of storage (with not too expensive storage upgrades).
So if its distributed evenly, we can host a good bit of videos (nothing compared to YouTube though).
Its nearly impossible to replicate what YouTube it is today. The amount of storage and bandwith require is immense, also the creators coming up to a new platform without a way to get money it will really hard to have something like YouTube.
Its nearly impossible to replicate what YouTube it is today.
Why would we want to? People want to replace Youtube because Youtube sucks ass. Replacing it with another monetized platform will only ever lead to the same place Youtube is at now.
It sucks that people who managed to make a living from their hobby have gotten fucked over, but until we have some major regulatory and economic overhauls, that's just how it works. Changing platforms is not a solution to that.
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Let's not forget that there's money to be earned by being a youtube person. Creating a model that would make this possible in a federated approach would be bonkers as hell and probably just invite predatory dipshits who then lure creators with seemingly good offers and then start to hold them hostage in ways YouTube hasn't dared so far.
lure creators with seemingly good offers and then start to hold them hostage in ways YouTube hasn't dared so far.
Like Smosh?
Young up and coomers, first giants on YouTube. Sold their channel and brand for stock. Then were tied to the company for years who worked them like dogs. Until the company that bought them went bankrupt so their stock was nullified and they in the end sold their company for $0.
I wouldn't say YouTube was free from it
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Yeah I think most people thinking we can just replace YouTube do not understand the scale of their operation. What YouTube does is many many orders of magnitude bigger and more complex than anything happening on the fediverse. PeerTube is a joke by comparison. There is a reason that even when VC money was flowing like crazy, nobody was able to even think about launching a competitor.
On top of that, no platform can seek to replace YouTube without offering the same or better creator compensation. Free services will never meet that.
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I literally have like 1TB of video stored on YouTube and privatized. Google is making $0 from my videos, but they still have to store them and have them available if I want to watch it (it's all of my Twitch VODs). Meanwhile websites like Streamable perma-delete my 5MB video after it gets 0 views in 2 milliseconds.
YouTube is a behemoth that will not be replaced.
I mean you're right that YouTube isn't going anywhere, but they're going to either delete that data or start charging you for it at some point
I'm shocked they haven't already. A good 95% of YouTube could be deleted and no one would notice, and would save Google millions and millions of dollars.
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I wouldn't count on that and I'd definitely recommend backups. I had a channel full of videos just disappear and I never found out what happened. I just went to check something one day and it was gone. The videos are all gone. Nobody could help I eventually just had to suck it up. From what I read at the time it happens here and there but not to people big enough for there to ever be a stink about it. Someone said it happens if you don't log on for long enough but I logged in every few months at least for various reasons so I dunno.
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lol reddit is still kicking, people. Don't count your chickens yet.
So is Facebook and Twitter. This meme is premature in triplicate.
Twitter, despite Elon's best efforts, is not dead yet 😆
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Moreover, killing Youtube will be harder than killing any of these social media. Serving video content is very expensive.
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Yeah, no. The deaths of those websites have not happened yet, and when they do, the Fediverse will not be the one holding the scythe
Yeah, FB was killed by the younger people abandoning it for other SM. Twitter was killed by Musk. Reddit was killed by Spez.
And by "killed", I mean "lost some users and content quality". They still have millions of active users.
And my personal feed on Reddit is pretty much unchanged. Very few niche subreddits went into an extended blackout, so I still got all my content. And since I use the mobile website (FF+uBlock), the API change didn't affect me that much. But I hope more communities from Reddit will move over here, especially the non-tech ones.
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I frankly don't see a way for federated video to happen unless uploads are severely limited or it's paywalled. Even with YouTube's wild compression, you're looking at several gigs for a single 4k video.
Honestly the fact that YouTube exists is a miracle. Video is still just monstrously large.
I hadn't dealt with video in years (like 2008) and recently used my Canon R6 to record a few seconds of 4k footage.
After getting over being annoyed at the camera stopping due to overheating after just 5 minutes, I was shocked to see a 7 second clip come to almost 700mb as a raw file.
Indeed video will probably be the last kind of network to see federation. It could take some pretty generous acts of philanthropy along the way to make anything sustainable happen.
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I think you can replace all social media with a decentralized version, except YouTube. Reason is cost and monetization.
Even if YouTube is questionable on privacy-YouTube have more of a product unlike social media where you are the product
with youtube, youre still the product, but at least you get something from it
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Yep people don't realize the cost of running YouTube, and why all the creators are there.
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None of these websites are dead, and youtube isn't going anywhere. You can't just host Zetabytes of video data on a home server.
...Not with that attitude.
Just call up Linustechtips and ask to collab on a zetabyte project. Probably get the storage drives for free, right?
/s
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You people are delusional. You are living in a fantasy.
I agree. I think it's just good that with all this shitstorm, a lot of the good users migrated to the Lemmy.
We don't need 100% of the Reddit population here, if we just get like 10-20% we will have potential to become the long gone golden age of Reddit.
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High five for those into fantasy!!
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No money to make on the fediverse => no (expensive to create) content.
Exactly. Youtube is there to stay, i think. I dont have many issues with it as well tbh. I pay for our family account and its just an amazing experience, no need for Spotify with YT Music as well. Creators earn more with premium too - the service is just working for me.
One could debate about hosting costs and revenue split and content policies, but in principle, i have no qualms with Youtube.
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Mastadon, Searx, Fediverse, and so on aren't killing or replacing the sites they're modeled after, not even close. They're just providing a privacy focused alternative for those who don't want to whored out by corporations or abused by powermods or shitty business decisions
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To replace YouTube, the decentralization platform https://odysee.com does a great job
Big channels like Veritasium have been migrating slowly
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Sooo... Facebook is dead? But it isn't?
All of these platforms are still used by many. As a someone who left Reddit for Lemmy I gotta say a lot of these people have a heavy dose of copium saying Reddit is dead just because they'd like it to be.
Well it's dead to me, OK‽
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The "dead" platforms still exist it just that they've undergone unacceptable amounts of corporate enshitification.
I like to think of them as retirement homes. Boomers retired on Facebook. The next gen of boomers will now retire on Reddit. I hope I never retire anywhere I want to try all the new things forever :(
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Super shilly comment incoming, but YouTube Premium is maybe the only subscription I pay for (other than Game Pass) that I think is worthwhile. I was also blown away by how much I like YouTube Music. Don’t get me wrong, I’m fully anticipating the platform to race to the bottom and go to complete and utter shit, but for the time being, I think it’s solid.
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Video is literally the data elephant in the room. I think we'll need AI to assist in developing something that demanding in terms of bandwidth. Remember, Youtube just works. No one is going to move to a platform where a video takes 30-60 seconds to load a video and a half an hour to upload a video when a practically instant option exists.
And I may be in the minority here, but so far, Google has been the least nefarious tech giant to my eyes. They haven't given me adequate reason to disavow them. I'm not saying they're good, I'm just saying they're not Musk Twitter, Zuck Meta, or the like. They don't obfuscate the fact that they sell your data like Meta, and they even understand the value of open source software, rare for a publically traded capitalist corporation. This will probably change, greed rot is universal, and they do treat their creators like dogshit on YouTube. But I'd be shocked if it was reasonably replacable by distributed enthusiasts given current infrastructure and bandwidth pricing. Estimates have Youtube's video data to be around 300 Petabytes, or 300,000 terabytes.
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I would love a decentralized TikTok replacement. Aside from everybody's privacy complaints, TikTok has a really addictive delivery model.
I would think that short video clips would be easier to federate than beefy 4k video files.
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The problem with YouTube is that people make real money off of their content, in an honest way. Unless you can match or exceed that level of income, you don't have much of a chance of competing. People's livelihoods would be at stake
Reddit was big, but not profitable for users. At most, it was a social boost and marketing. That's easily replaceable. Real, significant profiting, not so much.
I REALLY want there to be a better YT replacement on the fediverse or in some form of decentralized way.
As people are pointing out, videos are very large files, and therefore very expensive to host. The fediverse can mitigate this a little bit, as everyone can host their own videos on their own server, but that's not enough, and extremely inconvenient.
I do wonder if the blockchain/torrents can be used here... I'm not a dev or anything so IDK how any of it really works, but I think something to that tune is gonna be the only way, since traditional servers don't seem to be viable.
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In the case of a decentralized youtube, who would be responsible for the data storage?
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