cross-posted from: https://feddit.de/post/5294605
Youtube, for so many years, was just too good. Yes, they changed the 5 star rating system to likes and dislikes and a few years later disabled dislikes altogether, but their algorithm mostly digs up interesting content and it just works for creators and viewers.
This might change soon. Their new strategy to disallow ad-blockers will frustrate a certain kind of viewer. Those who dislike surveillance and like open-source tech, those who use uBlock Origin and know why.
Just like a few years ago mastodon suddenly reached a certain kind of popularity, because twitter had their first big fuckup, maybe Peertube is next. It certainly is the most polished decentralized solution that doesn’t use a blockchain. Creators or fans could easily host their own videos, fans can watch it, without ads.
Taking some simple napkin math, I have a 1min 1080p video downloaded from YT. It clocks in at 15MB.
So, Gamer’s Nexus has 2.6k videos. (That’s insane, btw, but fairly large channel, not even LTT size though).
Assuming just 1080p, and let’s say about 10min average per video. (Some are less, some are 40+), that’s 150MB per 10min video, and that means it’s 390,000Mb (or 380.86GB) for their collection. Assuming I’m wrong and the average is even half of that, and the average GN video is only 5 minutes that’s still 190GB. And that isn’t counting 4k, or the multiple other formats to optimize streaming (720, 480, 360, misc bitrates, etc)
And that’s just storage, not even taking into account compute! (Or egress, or transcriptions, or scaling, or…)
Really for something like Peertube to take off it will require each channel to spin up their own instance, which honestly is just another expense for them, one that Youtube does for them for free, plus Youtube offers to pay them. Which, would cut down on some of the chaff (only people who want to do it would do it), but yeah, I don’t think it’s going to replace YT at any point. Smaller channels can combine for sure, but there is definitely a threshold where it becomes extremely costly.
I’m all for the fediverse, but video streaming is freaking costly and expensive. There’s definitely a reason youtube has a monopoly on it. Now this isn’t to discourage, but more for anyone who may be thinking "yeah why doesn’t peertube just replace it?)
It could be done if peertube used a scheme like BitTorrent. We are approaching a time where enough users have sufficient upstream bandwidth for video.
But then, even without hosting costs, creating videos takes much more time and effort than writing a short text.
Nice idea, but then everytime a video that contains anything licensed by the content mafia is uploaded (even partly), the user in question breaks that license opening themselves up to lawsuits.
In a perfect world where only properly free content is shared that model would work. But that is not how most content shared on YouTube looks like.
A long time ago I read a paper how to mitigate this. Without remembering the details, the idea was: 1. One peer never holds a complete file, only parts of it. 2. You need a key to find all parts of the file and get them in the right order. So Disney can only accuse you of having an incomplete and unusable part of their movie.
But copyrighted material is only one issue. Do you want your hardware to be used for distributing depictions of sexual abuse, or inciting hatred and violence? Any YouTube replacement will need strong moderation tools.
That is essentially how bittorrent works anyway. In Germany people lost in court over this. Also portions of a copyrighted file are a problem. If they can “proof” that they got a relevant portion (more than the typical fair use seconds) you are still on the hook.
‘Landgericht Hamburg’ proofing will be hard, admittedly. But doesn’t BT just split up a file in x parts, so each part is watchable? What if you sliced differently, like every 100th byte of a file? Or even bitwise slicing? Not one 600 s snippet but 60000 10 ms snippets from throughout the movie.
That could help, but if a file is not shared that much (yet) or not many people are online at the moment, a single peer will still share many more parts, likely ending up with having shared significant amounts.
The concept is that will only happen if you have watched that video depicting sexual abuse, because your peertube client (the website) won’t download videos you didn’t watch.
I was thinking of a hypothetical system were peers provide storage for creators independently of what they are watching (in response to ‘videos take too much storage for individuals to host’ comment. For peertube, you are right.
That’s why it needs to be an international project. Paid by every country together. Sure some will initially have to pay more but sooner or later everyone wants to be part of it and pay their part.