I'm afraid the barrier to entry for this is much higher, as video streaming is quite expensive. You need a lot of storage and also a lot of traffic.
Yeah, good point. The others are mainly hosting text and some images
It seems like PeerTube does allow peer to peer streaming of watched videos too, so that might help mitigate the bandwidth requirements. The storage and transcoding requirements will be far larger than things like Lemmy though, agreed.
I see potential in a site that offers an alternative algorithm, or curated list of channels, but still links to youtube for the streaming itself. The content that Youtube shows me has gotten quite bad lately... and the search doesn't even work properly.
The main thing here is that twitter and Reddit dont pay their popular users (massively followed accounts i mean), but YouTube does. As long as PeerTube won't have a business model, and they never will because that's not what it was created for, i dont think there will be any migration
This.
YouTube and Twitch are in this same boat. The video format is a hugely lucrative one. Many people consume it passively, either in the background or while doing other things. The ad exposure is huge, and there's a ton of value in having people invested in your platform, so financial incentives are high.
There just aren't enough people who are willing or able to put that much effort into making rich content for free, especia6when there's a payed alternative
It doesn't really seem workable right now. A video platform that just lets anybody upload anything and everything onto a large main server is going to use completely absurd amounts of storage and bandwidth, so PeerTube can only really work if most people either self-host or join small communities to host their videos.
Unfortunately, PeerTube is absolutely terrible for discovering videos you'd enjoy on smaller instances. Until they can fix that, there's really no hope of it taking off. I'd love to see it happen, but we're just not there right now.
Yea, having a competitor to youtube seem near impossible. The only reason youtube survived was because Google bought them, who was able to provide them with the insane resources required for a video hosting platform. Similar to Twitch being bought by Amazon, which has AWS.
I've looked at peertube a few times, and everytime I do, it seems to be filled with nothing but videos about the latest cryptoscamcoin. I have zero interest in that at all. Until they get content worth watching, it's not going to happen.
It’s the chicken & egg problem; people won’t use peertube because there’s no good content on there and content creators wont go there because the people aren’t there
But they are also going to struggle to monetise their content.
Does peer tube have monetisation features? Or would it all be sponsors, patreons and product placement?
I will volunteer resources all day long to post a mostly text platform such as mastodon/lemmy/etc.
But- doing video streaming, consumes a lot of resources.
Using, my plex as an example, it supports a few handfuls of people. But- scaling that to hundreds/thousands... Its not going to be fun.
Videos take up a ton of room. Streaming them, consumes resources for transcoding.
For YouTube is extremely difficult, people are very used to it, and they are not moving to other platforms when there are decisions clearly against the users as they depend entirely on the creator's decision (and they will not earn as much money on other platforms... They are still "workers"), it is not as easy as leaving Twitter and Reddit for Mastodon and Lemmy since in this case their creators are the community of users themselves.
There is also the problem of needing a huge storage to save the videos, unfeasible for an open source/FOSS community project unless the rates of adoption are enormous enough and everyone contribute/donate, or at least until we start using more efficient codecs and video compression.
Another big thing I can see being a problem (other than cost and lack of monetization) would be the lack of Content ID. For as much shit as people give it, it does solve a big problem of lengthy and expensive lawsuits, especially for smaller channels who don't necessarily have a company behind them.
Youtube is the only truly great social media platform left. It pains me to say it, but the bar is quite low! It pays creators better than its rivals and its premium subscription is generally considered good value. Remember - it's both users and creators that need to migrate.
Really, there cannot be an alternative until there's one that can afford to pay content creators the same or more than YouTube can. No content, no platform.
It also needs to be able to distribute the cost for hosting insane amounts of video data, which is notoriously expensive. A single instance could bankrupt a person if it got hit with a large influx of users. Some lemmy instances has to brace for a rough ride as Reddit refugees jumped ship, and YouTube has a lot more users than Reddit. Even a tiny migration could be hell to deal with.
There will also need to be a purge of extremist content from any platform that wants to invite a migration. If all you have is weirdos evangelising dodgy cryptocoins and conspiracy theorists complaining about being booted off YouTube, nobody will want to go.
Peertube just isn't the platform for this to happen. At least not yet.
I only disagree with one thing on that: youtube is not a social media platform. It is horrible for discussions, topic discovery and organization, the comment sections and chat are worse than 4chan. It is a video diffusion platform, but not truly social media.
Which is sad, because it used to be a much more social platform. I used to run a small channel in 2007 and I'd get people messaging me, or adding me to friends (yes, that was a thing on YouTube).
That's going to take megabucks. Huge bandwidth, storage and compute. Who's going to pay for it?
Everybody gangsta until they realise that their usage of services incurs costs
Not it
Memes and text comments can be easily self hosted, but video hosting requires an expensive server farm with petabytes of SSDs, bandwidth and lots of GPUs for transcoding. Ok if you make a subscription only service like nebula or floatplane, but it's impossibile to host an ad-free service and rely on the few donations.
Linus Tech Tips recently did a video where they go over the cost and complexity of running something like YouTube.
Frankly I’m surprised 4k video wasn’t locked behind Premium from the start.
Part of me wonders if YouTube could have scaled up more gracefully if they pushed a subscription option earlier (and priced it better, I hate how it’s bundled with a music service I don’t want).
Ads fucking suck, but I think most people recognize they are a necessary evil in order to run any kind of free social video platform at a meaningful scale.
If a platform didn't do transcoding, and requested content creators do it themselves, I wonder if that'd help enough to make it more feasible? Then its just bandwidth and storage, and storage has only gotten cheaper over the years.
A lot of people in this thread talking about how it's not feasible because content creators wouldn't get paid and I agree if you expect that same quality of content.
But I think peertube opens the door for a lot of the more organic content of just people sharing interesting/entertaining/educational videos with others without any expectation of being paid. I've already watched some really good videos on peertube that feel a lot more like the old days of YouTube.
I think at most you’d see people cross posting videos there as a secondary platform
Not going to happen. All the alternatives so far are attracting all the nutjobs and platform ends up with loth of garbage conspiracy videos, antisemitic, racist…etc users who would be otherwise straight banned from youtube.
YouTube is one of the only groups that actually makes a profit..or at least gets close to making one - the metric seems to change with the economy.
Also it has a monetization model, which makes it infinitely more enticing than an instance that's more likely to cost money.
Finally the cost of storing and serving video is exponentially higher than images gifs and text, making it more prohibitedly expensive the more users you have.
Sure you could have a pretty ok system if they added a built in patreon like mechanism to peertube, with a revenue split. But it remains to be seen if creators and people are willing to negotiate and give up enough revenue in order to keep the server alive. And also it becomes a bit more businesslike - as you've seen with twitch, giving a worse split is bound to cause backlash and people to drop your instance, even if it's necessary to break even.
There's next to no chance you'll have an easy time if you wanted to migrate your account to another instance - especially if you wanted to keep all your videos. You'd probably have to re-upload them all as most migration setups on the fediverse don't move post data due to the prohibitive amount of data there is, more so for pictures and video
I think we'd be more likely to see pixelfed replace Instagram and pixiv than peertube replace YouTube.
Doubt it, it's expensive to host and creators won't have ways to ways to monetize it as easily as YouTube.
Also, I wouldn't really call the Twitter and Reddit cases "exodus". As much as I would like to see the fediverse succeed, the number of users on mastodon and Lemmy are just a blip on the radar.
I still see the same links on my Lemmy frontage days after they have been submitted, it's far less active than Reddit.
YouTube has a bunch of issues:
1/ climate change:
2/ monetisation:
Going on Peertube could mostly fix every ecological problems for the lost of the uncertainty of the monetisation system.
Plus there is a psychological weigh on creators that goes with the monetisation and algorithm of YouTube.
How would such a system be more efficient? That is very counter intuitive. In addition the question would be who pays for PeerTube. Because unlike Mastodon or Lemmy and the likes, storing large amounts of video files is actually damn expensive.
Smaller servers doesn't mean less work is being done. It means the work is being distributed outside the server farm. Quite likely it is less efficient, not more.
Better chance of YT -> Odysee
It might have potential and the video quality is decent, but unless they sort out their banning policy it will only attract nutjobs and all kind of anti[something]ists, [something]phobes… etc.
Reading comment sections is making me puke.
All the crypto crap is not helping as well.
I am prefering paying some money for nebula, which might not have a big creator base but everything I need, sometimes some bonus content and no ads. But this one is not for everyone.
Just for conversations sake, what is Odysee really? I've only heard of it in the context of crypto stuff, but is it selfhostable? A federated video platform that let's you "mine", in the loosest terms, crypto from viewers sounds interesting but I don't know how it actually works.
Speaking of, got any good peertube channels? Tbh, I'm more familiar with nebula and floatplane - where YT creators made their own platform. Maybe that's where things are headed
I don't think YouTube is possible peer to peer, Lemmy/Reddit and Mastodon/twitter are mostly text with some images, not too difficult to store and network. YouTube on the other hand has astronomically high costs to store and serve their videos, more hardware than people have to spare for free
I don't think so. The idea might be nice, but Peertube has neither the audience, nor the monetisation of platforms like YouTube. Moving to peertube just isn't a good business decision for that.
Video hosting is also expensive, especially since they would also have to deal with DMCA claims and all of that. YouTube wasn't really profitable, or even breaking even until rather recently, nearly a full decade after they started. It's not really economical to do video hosting quite like that.
Peertube might be good for casual use, but I also can't see any content creators using it. (Not unlike 2005 YouTube in that sense), and the lack of content creators also means a lack of audience (and through them, content) that might attract more users over. People are more likely to move over to something like Patreon or Twitch instead.
I see existential problems for peertube, because of copyright infringement.
Well Google is gutting ad blockers. So maybe there will be an extremely minor exodus yet.
as disgusting as it feels, I think paying for Youtube Premium is a pretty good deal. You get no ads, and creators get much, much more money per view. I'm not sure what it is for videos, but with Youtube Music, by band gets literally ten times as much per listen from as Premium subscriber than an "ad supported" one. Given the sheer amount of otherwise free high quality material on the platform, the tiny amount they ask each month for it is pretty decent. IMO, YMMV, IANAL, consult your doctor before taking, etc
Fair point. I watch a lot of YT and block ads (though it sounds like they're finally cracking down on that). I support some creators on Nebula and Patreon, but I guess YT Premium is basically like those.
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