So Elon gutted Twitter, and people jumped ship to Mastodon. Now spez did… you know… and we’re on Lemmy and Kbin. Can we have a YouTube to PeerTube exodus next? With the whole ad-pocalypse over there, seems like Google is itching for it.
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’d expect p2p streaming to soften the blow for the traffic bill generated by popular videos. You’d always need somebody else to consume the content at the same time which doesn’t happen in most cases.
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.
If you’re taking a similar route to YouTube, you also need a ton of CPU/GPU power and/or specialized hardware. YouTube transcodes every video into 2 (3 for videos with >~2M views) different formats in 5 different resolutions. A community-run service could skip on some of that, but it’d come at the cost of lower quality, less support for older devices, or higher bandwidth usage.
The main thing here is that twitter and Reddit dont pay their popular usées (massively followed accounts i mean), but YouTube does. As long as PeerTube won’t have a business modèle, and they’re never will because that’s mot what it was created for, i dont think there will ne 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
Don’t most youtubers get their money from in video sponsorships these days?
Yeah, because sponsors are confident enough to trust a youtube-based audience. Good luck for PeerTubers to get sponsorships
These days it isn’t just a YouTube based audience. It’s YouTube and tiktok and Instagram etc etc. Sure exclusive peertubers won’t get sponsorships, but they don’t need to be exclusive, at first at least. peertube currently wouldn’t even factor in, but if it were to take off even moderately it could start to be part of the conversation.
Every youtuber I follow has some contiginency for when the YouTube algorithm turns against them. Patreon, nebula, floatplane, podcasts the list goes on and on.
The problem really is on the hosting side imo and I don’t think activitypub solves it the way it does for text based content.
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?
Yes but it’s the creators that brings the people. YouTube worked because at the beginning it was the only place where you could upload videos and nobody was thinking about making a dime.
That’s true.
I use RSS feed to follow youtube channels, but if they happen to upload to odysee or peertube as well, I follow them there instead. Just to give a YouTube competitor a bit more traffic.
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.
There’s https://sepiasearch.org/ for global video search. It’s a search engine, run by the developers, that indexes every approved instance. So if you’re only interested in watching videos (and don’t mind searching for them), then it’s even easier than other Fediverse services, because you have one central place you can go to for all your videos.
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.
Well, PeerTube works like torrents - which are proven to scale well.
I’ll take you word for its implementation-
Main problem stems from monetization.
That, is the real issue. Persuading content creators to come elsewhere will always be a challenge, especially as… well. income/money is the reason most of them make videos.
This is compounded by the fact, the majority of us purposely block ads, and nobody is going to switch from youtube, to a platform filled with ads.
In terms of compensation, that gets even tricker. If- the content creators are being compensated, then the people hosted the petabytes worth of videos, is going to want to be compensated as well.
Honestly, as dumb as it sounds, the best way to implement this, might be in a form of storage-based crypto, where the coins are earned from the pieces of videos you are hosted.
Let’s be honest- 99% of us don’t pay a cent for watching youtube content, and over 90% of us block all of the ads.
Lbry already tried that.
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.
Or the lack of content id could lead to people using more libre and open arts to make content. Therefore making the very need of content id irrelevant.
That’s going to take megabucks. Huge bandwidth, storage and compute. Who’s going to pay for it?
Not it
Everybody gangsta until they realise that their usage of services incurs costs
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.
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).
Nothing can really be worse than 4chan. Youtube users are primed to say genuinely stupid things and enjoy reinforcing ignorance, while 4chan users have always had the primary goal of causing as much harm and destruction as possible including but not limited to suicides, poisonings, and proliferation of genocidal ideologies.
“and its premium subscription is generally considered good value”
That’s funny. You must live in a different world than I do.
Well at least the hosting is cleverly helped by having the videos be shared by every user watching it at the same time. So viral videos are a lot less likely to take the platform down. But even though thats most of the bandwith cost its not all.
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There already are some that are fully relying on external income and leave there video unmonitized by google. But yeah most smaller channels dont have that option.
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.
Does peertube ban people for having sponsors? If you could get enough views to get a sponsor you could make money that way.
Peertube itself is just an open source self-hostable web application. Each Peertube instance has their own rules.
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.
The sword of free speech cuts both ways. You think they are “nutjobs” but you do not have the right to tell others not to listen to them. You are fully within your rights to not associate with them or their content. They may think your side are the “nutjobs” but they dont have the right to silence you either. Therefore anyone can post anything they want and it is up to the individual to decide what content they will consume and which content they will not associate with.
I think at most you’d see people cross posting videos there as a secondary platform
That is precisely why I run my own instance, it’s essentially a backup from YouTube of my own dumb videos: https://peertube.bloonface.com
But honestly that’s pretty much all it is. It’s not really worth much more than that to me.
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.
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The other thing to keep in mind is that youtube (and twitch, and shudders quora), with all its problems, does share revenue with creators on the platform, instead of treating them as free labor.
I would love to see it, but I dont think we are there yet. No impetus to switch combined with much more expensive tech. I would also antipate dmca to turn the whole thing into a mess. But one day we’ll get there hopefully.
Yeah, that was why my comment was more aimed at personal hosting, as opposed to a shared one.
Say, I don’t know, a known figure like jackscepticeye (to name a big streamer) hiring a server and creating his own instance of a fediverse software that allows him to host all his videos, where he gets to decide which ad-provider to use, how to control subscription tiers, and so on.
Even a smaller creator could do this, as costs would scale with popularity but so would revenue.
I’m not sure if PeerTube can do this, or if it would have to be a completely different software, though.
As for DMCAs, that would be the responsibility of each creator, of course. They would no longer have the “protection” of corporations like Youtube and Twitch.
Self-management is a big ordeal.
It’s one of those pro/con things each person must weigh upon when making a decision: “sure, Twitch/Youtube takes a piece of the pie and gets pushy with copyright, but I don’t have to deal with servers or DMCAs or paying the hosting directly”.
Hosting and bandwidth for videos has a big cost.
Plus it’s computationally expensive. YouTube has entire data centers filled with servers using custom silicon to encode ingested videos into nearly every resolution/framerate and codec they serve, so that different clients get the most efficient option for their quality settings and supported codecs, no matter what the original uploader happened to upload. Granted, that workflow mainly makes sense because of bandwidth costs, but the high quality of the user experience depends on that backend.
Fascinating! I guess I should have known, because I use yt-dlp a lot and see each video has multiple formats available, but multimedia streaming is not my forte so I never put much thought into the technicalities.
Pardon the ignorant follow-up question: it doesn’t encode on-the-fly, right? It encodes upon uploading the source, then it keeps a copy of each format?
As I understand it, it ingests an uploaded video and automatically encodes it in a bunch of different quality settings in h.264, then, if the video is popular enough to justify the computational cost of encoding into AV1 and VP9, they’ll do that when the video reaches something like 1000 views. And yes, once encoded they just keep the copies so that it doesn’t have to be done again.
Here’s a 2-year-old blog post where YouTube describes some of the technical challenges.
As that blog post explains, when you’re running a service that ingests 500 hours of user submitted video every minute, you’ll need to handle that task differently than how, for example, Netflix does (with way more video minutes being served, but a comparatively tiny amount of original video content to encode, where bandwidth efficiency becomes far more important than encoding computational efficiency).
Thanks a lot for the explanation and the link.
I asked about that because I thought if it’s a one-time thing, then the uploader would be the one using their own computer to encode. Maybe they’re given a desktop software or a set configurations for, say, ffmpeg. It would certainly be less attractive than to just upload it and let the platform handle it.
Yeah, I think it’s doable to distribute that compute burden if each channel owner has a desktop CPU laying around to encode a bunch of video formats, but lots of people are doing stuff directly on their phones, and I don’t think a phone CPU/GPU would be able to process a significant amount of video without heat/power issues.
