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.

  • BitPirate@feddit.de
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • james@lemmy.jamesj999.co.uk
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • BitPirate@feddit.de
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        1 year ago

        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.

    • Double_A@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      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.

    • maximus@lemmy.sdf.org
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      1 year ago

      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.

  • pdlrd://@terefere.eu
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    1 year ago

    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

    • archomrade [he/him]@midwest.social
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      1 year ago

      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

    • saigot@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      Don’t most youtubers get their money from in video sponsorships these days?

      • pdlrd://@terefere.eu
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        1 year ago

        Yeah, because sponsors are confident enough to trust a youtube-based audience. Good luck for PeerTubers to get sponsorships

        • saigot@lemmy.ca
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          1 year ago

          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.

  • Dusty@lemmy.dustybeer.com
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • grant 🍞@toast.ooo
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      1 year ago

      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

      • palitu@lemmy.perthchat.org
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        1 year ago

        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?

      • AnagrammadiCodeina@feddit.it
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        1 year ago

        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.

      • mim@lemmy.sdf.org
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        1 year ago

        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.

  • Yozul@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • bazoogle@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      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.

  • HTTP_404_NotFound@lemmyonline.com
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • sznio@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      Well, PeerTube works like torrents - which are proven to scale well. Main problem stems from monetization.

      • HTTP_404_NotFound@lemmyonline.com
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        1 year ago

        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.

  • Eavolution@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    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.

    See (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Jwo5qc78QU&t=1338)[Tom Scott’s video on copyright].

    • webghost0101@lemmy.fmhy.ml
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      1 year ago

      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.

  • noodle@feddit.uk
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • Gsus4@lemmy.one
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • sznio@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        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).

      • Kwakigra@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        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.

        • Gsus4@lemmy.one
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          1 year ago

          Ok, when I said worse, it was from this point of view: in some subchans, I’ve seen some smart conversations and advice there among the 95% neverending jungle of slurs (they probably see that as a feature, not a bug). In yt: never, the medium simply doesn’t work to make people talk.

    • Zacryon@feddit.de
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      1 year ago

      “and its premium subscription is generally considered good value”

      That’s funny. You must live in a different world than I do.

    • Onurb@feddit.de
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      1 year ago

      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.

  • Ivyymmy@lemmy.one
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • sammydee@readit.buzz
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    1 year ago

    That’s going to take megabucks. Huge bandwidth, storage and compute. Who’s going to pay for it?

  • Hovenko@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • shortwavesurfer@monero.town
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      1 year ago

      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.

    • Hovenko@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      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.

    • meteokr@community.adiquaints.moe
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • tvmole@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
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        1 year ago

        I’m reading their FAQ here, but I’m still not sure how the money and hosting side works yet https://help.odysee.tv/category-basics/whatisodysee/

        Edit: looks like it’s at least partially open source, maybe fully. It’s centrally-hosted and funded by ads, premium subscriptions, and some sort of crypto scheme that can boost a video’s discoverability. I’ve actually heard of some of the creators though (unlike PeerTube), so that’s interesting

  • Da_Boom@iusearchlinux.fyi
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • Sparking@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      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.

    • Barry Zuckerkorn@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      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.

        • Barry Zuckerkorn@beehaw.org
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          1 year ago

          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).

    • Drewelite@sopuli.xyz
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      1 year ago

      Honestly, people generally have more compute power than they need. If this proverbial platform came with an efficient transcoder, then the files just need to be hosted.
      The torrenting scene is alive and well with users fronting the cost and taking legal risks. Many torrents have enough speed to actually stream the content while it’s downloading. Hard to say now… But if somebody set up a solid peer-to-peer solution, I think it has a chance.