YouTube --> PeerTube Next?
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.
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 modèle, and they're never will because that's mot 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
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. Main problem stems from monetization.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
I'm pretty sure the average successful YouTube content creators can invest in one computer to host his own content on peertube. For start that's all what is needed.
Video storage is a false problem, creators already store their content locally (to not lose the work if there is any issue).
On the technical side, others have answer that question here but in short:
I will need more precise questions for better answers.
I'm pretty sure you got that backwards ... Distributed systems like Lemmy and PeerTube rely on large amounts of redundancy and duplication. In general, centralized systems are going to be more efficient by default. YouTube is an "ecological nightmare" simply because it's absolutely massive. If PeerTube grows to anywhere near the same scale, you can be sure it will far eclipse total energy usage (and also be harder to measure).
I don't see how billions of users connected on the same pipe can be more efficient than being connected each to a different point of a network.
I think YouTube is mostly a network of datacenter of his own right now, but that doesn't change anything since we can not see it.
On the energy usage, maybe, but this usage will be better spread across the earth than being concentrated on a few points.
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.
I see existential problems for peertube, because of copyright infringement.
The thing is creators should use libre or open content to put in their videos.
If you use copyrighted content it means you don't care about og creators stating that they don't want to use their work. What's so wrong about respecting creator's wishes about their work ?
Youtube is great as long as you don't read the comments
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 think this is super interesting, and a really good idea. But as others have stated in this thread, very costly.
However until technology catches up, maybe we could have an interstitial federated platform. One that's super decentralized. Like 90% of the users running their own instance, decentralized. Anyone with a NAS can host they're own vids. Then the other 10% that are willing to host high bandwidth, high capacity servers, can work as caching for the most popular videos.
Nebula has been quite successful as far as I can tell. A whole bunch of educational YouTubers have moved over or were part of establishing it and honestly it works well. Videos can download to your device, the quality is the same, the app is a tiny bit janky but nowhere near as bad as all the ads etc on the YouTube app, and the cost is actually reasonable and goes in a reasonable share to the creators. I strongly prefer direct access to creators like this and also like on Patreon. Direct support means there is no advertiser in between to demonetise a video or have it taken down because it is controversial. You can't even have a WW2 documentary on YouTube but you can have actual Nazis, but on Nebula you get analysis and history without Nike or Surfshark being reticent to sponsor a video.
Mentioning Nebula reminded me that I wanted to set up an account on there - just did and very impressed with the amount of creators, some have never even mentioned that they've got a channel there?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, good point. The others are mainly hosting text and some images
I see the switch from YouTube will be the final move, because it is has the most hurdles to overcome. Smart people will eventually figure out an efficient way to get things rolling. Fingers crossed it's soon!
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.
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.
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.
Gotta be a way for folks to get paid. Most of the folks I watch on YouTube do it for a living.
It probably wouldn't be able to be exactly like YouTube with regular "shows" but rather like YouTube was at the beginning where people just uploaded their random videos to share.
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
Biggest issues with Peertube so far: Lack of content Lack of an iOS client
That's unlikely. Both Reddit and Twitter speak or at least spoke to people who enjoy a certain image of being anti establishment (in one way or another and whether that's warranted or not). Youtube just doesn't. You can't get more mainstream than Youtube.
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.
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.
First I’ve heard of alternatives to YouTube. Do they pay content creators the same or is it just people posting for free there?
Each channel has a option to put your support information so people can pay you through patreon, etc. Peertube instances are offering their video hosting for free. You can put in video ads or patreon like services to enable payments. Peertube instances can ask for money as well to help with hosting costs. It's the same business model as all other federated software. The cost of video hosting is distributed by instances and also uses bittorrent to help with sharing the load.
They are just offering the free service of video hosting. There are no advertisements and no paid accounts, so all they could share are costs, not income. They are not an advertisement/monetarization service.
Pay?
YouTube pays content creators: https://www.youtube.com/howyoutubeworks/product-features/monetization/
This pay likely makes up a significant portion of YouTube creators' revenue in addition to in-video sponsor spots/whatever a creator's equivalent is. Without this kind of payment it's not likely that a YouTube competitor could take off in a meaningful way.
Problem is youtube is a platform that pays its content creators. It won't ever happen. If discord ever decides they want to be profitable then that'll be next.
Im not surprised. For years we all enjoyed a ton of "free" services but eventually these companies would have to make money.
Have a look at tilvids.com. I know of a couple of large YouTubers that crosspost their stuff there, and there are probably more that I don't know about.
Which ones? About 90% of the local videos list appear to be Linux channels.
Youtubers and streamers are different as they create content for getting paid by those services. Peer to peer video content cant replace youtube as it is without government level universal income basically. Most dont make enough from patreon or w/e to survive
Youtubers generally make more from sponsorships than adsense, at least from what I've gathered. The reason to still run adsense even though it might annoy your audience is that if you don't you get penalised by the algorithm.
Where I could easily see peertube taking off is with public broadcasters and generally media companies doing video that's free to view, as far as youtubers is concerned I wouldn't be surprised if e.g. nebula started to federate... they can still have a "paying customer vs. free content" type of separation while probably saving on bandwidth costs.
A big thing would be the likes of vimeo seeing this as an opportunity. Unless you're already running such a platform you probably don't want to get into the business of contentid and copyright strikes and would restrict your platform to well-known and/or paying actors, or, well, yourself.
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.
i agree with that video also, free 4k video for something that most times it's just entertainment when you're doing something else, it's a bit pointless
i have a 4k monitor but most of the times i watch 720p from my invidious instance because i prefer saving my own bandwidth to the visual quality for this kind of content.
If it's a movie, then it's different, 4k it's a must
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.
Yeah, I wonder what the cost breakdown is for transcoding, storage, streaming, etc.
If Youtube blocks Adblockers, maybe.. but I think ppl will go to Odysse&Co first
If you think an ad-pocalypse is bad, then why would they jump to a platform with no ads at all? They'd likely be paying to be on that platform. Also the fact streaming video from a self hosting platform is much more demanding then text fedi instances like Lemmy or Mastodon. Also no way the fedi could keep up with even a fraction of YouTube's creator tools, or their audience which is their bottom line.
YouTube will probably never be replaced. We can at least go for private front ends like Invidious.
https://tutanota.com/blog/google-youtube-invidious-privacy-alternative
Google is probably going to kill private front ends rather sooner than later. First signs are already there.
Except they can't - invidious uses the same front end APIs as the YouTube website. It probably also does web scraping.
Sure it's a violation of TOS(frontend TOS - not API TOS) but because it latches on to publicly available parts of the YouTube system (in a similar way to yt-dlp) it's essentially got a free pass - you can't stop people from using freely accessible parts however they want. As a result it's not able to use the accounts system (or at least, it shouldn't be.
Yt doesn't really have a leg to stand on.. it might not stop them from trying to sue. But in the very least it won't stop people from forking the invidious code and building their own in a sort of striesand effect. Even if the original product dies, invidious as a whole won't, and can't die.
I wouldn't for the reasons mentioned by others.
There's no monetization; I would have to find, attract, and deal with sponsors on my own.
There's not really much in the way of audience which makes the above harder since I would need numbers/
There's also the whole thing about bandwidth.
Then there's all the sysadmin stuff to do, security updates, etc.
Then there's still the legal and other admin roles, presumably, about DMCA, etc.
I do not have the time for any of that right now.
I think that running a YT channel large enough to support yourself has problems of equal magnitude. I also think that depending on making money from YT impressions rather than trying to develop other means of monetizing your videos (merch, embedded sponsors, patrons, community servers, digital assets, etc) is pretty risky, given YT's track record of radically restructuring and cutting payments and Google's track record of screwing over everyone who ever counts on them. It only takes a moment to get de-platformed for literally no damn reason. It's worth the effort to try it. All a creator really has to do is say, "it's okay if you mirror this content on PeerTube." That's not a lot of work.
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.
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
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.
It sounds like YouTube is heading towards conflict with it's long-term content providers as well. Their new algorithm heavily favors "shorts". This really screws over the traditional medium to long format creators who arguably made YouTube successful. Sounds like they want to move quickly into the TikTok space but it's sad for a lot of creators who are losing significant income d/t this change.
Reddit has 500 million MAU, and this is a conservative estimate. Youtube on the other hand, is sitting comfortably at 4x this number, 2 billion MAU.
Considering that, and the nature of the platform, I'm pretty certain they are too big to fail.
The thing I find fascinating is I only have 1 reddit account, but I effectively have dozens of YT accounts. Just on this device I have newpipe, and libretube. Libretube has around a dozen auto generated random instances associated. Both my laptops have Freetube. I had 4 regular YouTube channels with various gmail accounts linked from when I actually posted content. Practically every device I have replaced had random YT accounts too. I know what I like to watch and importing and exporting features usually fail.
Maybe it is just newpipe being screwy but in my watch history, newpipe shows how many times I've watched any given upload. Most stuff I've watched says some bogus number of views like 6-10 when I just watched it once. Some report correctly, but most do not. It would not surprise me if this is actually YouTube. I can say, for most of the stuff I watch I'm a solid 2 dozen subscribers or more.
No one is too big too fail. There just needs to be a better service, which right now there definitely is not.
And hosting text, images and links on decentralized servers is one thing. High bitrate video, plus the network infrastructure to serve it, is kind of a whole different ballgame. I could see this system working for some kind of torrent/file sharing service that hosts video but not a YouTube competitor.
its really interesting how much we want an alt to common social medias now imo. for example, streamers are migrating from Twitch to Kick, and as you mentioned, Youtube to PeerTube/rumble
All these companies are constantly pushing just how greedy they can be and it's getting so tiresome. Short term gains and shareholders are the worst thing to happen to a free Internet aside from governments
I think at most you’d see people cross posting videos there as a secondary platform
Peertube always felt hard to use, and no one has really caught on to it imo.
Well Google is gutting ad blockers. So maybe there will be an extremely minor exodus yet.
On PC, this only really affects you if you're still using Google Chrome. Firefox isn't quite as nice as Chrome (don't @ me, it's the truth) but it is serviceable and uBlock Origin deals with 99% of ads just fine.
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.
Because of the increased revenue to creators I don’t feel so bad about installing sponsorblock to skip in-video ads
Me and my partner pay jointly for Premium and I wouldn't want to go back. No ads on any device we watch on, knowing that the creators get a good chunk of change from it, is bliss.
Got YT Premium for my family the past few years, it's been great NGL. It probably gets more use than any other streaming service, and would probably be the last paid service i gave up for video.
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.
I hate this notion that a platform isn't successful unless it has a billion users. As long as there's a critical mass of people, it's fine. One thing I've realised browsing lemmy for the past week is just how much of my Reddit experience was defined by the same handful of Twitter screenshots and rehosted tiktoks being reposted over and over again like every week.
I still see the same links on my Lemmy frontage days after they have been submitted, it’s far less active than Reddit.
Use sort by Top -> Day. The algorithm for that one is working.
I still see the same links on my Lemmy frontage days after they have been submitted, it’s far less active than Reddit.
I think this is because of the default sort. I switched to "Top Day" and have found it to be a better mix of posts with engagement and freshness.
yeah, default sort really messes with things but we average about a comment per minute and at least 100 submissions per day from what i can tell--there's no shortage of activity even here, with just our ~4,000 active users and ~12,000 accounts overall, it's just camouflaged.
Replacing YouTube is a bad idea
At the very least competition is needed.
YouTube is getting increasingly user-hostile with monetization with the huge increase in pre-roll and mid-roll ads, starting to lock resolutions above 1080p behind a paywall ( this was reported months ago but I've recently stumbled into my first two videos where 1080p60 and above was paywalled), and even getting aggressive on adblockers.
If I recall correctly, they are also testing 10 unskippable ads before sone videos now, right? Fun times ahead!
I would rather go for reasonable competition. Ideally more than one. I really enjoy nebula for example.
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
Nebula is not bad. I paid for it for a year, but had some issues with not enough content and the buggy UI on Firefox. If Youtube blocks adblockers, I'll certainly go back to it.